CGI artist Jim Kazanjian’s work is both surreal and hyper-real, looking for all the world like photos of true, improbable things.
He’s just completed four new pieces that fit comfortably in his canon of Lovecraftian, fanciful, dark pictures of a world that doesn’t exist, where belching smokestacks and decrepit buildings sit on lonely landscapes. He uses found photos and digital compositing techniques to make what he calls “hyper-collage.”
Through a palimpsest-like layering process of adding and subtracting, I gradually blend the various parts together. I am basically manipulating and assembling a disparate array of multiple photographic elements (sometimes more than 50) to produce a single homogenized image. I do not use a camera at any stage in the process.
My method of construction has an improvisational and random quality to it, since it is largely driven by the source material I have available. I wade through my archive constantly and search for interesting combinations and relationships. Each new piece I bring to the composition informs the image’s potential direction. It is an iterative and organic process where the end result is many times removed from its origin. I think of the work as a type of mutation which can haphazardly spawn in numerous and unpredictable directions.
