Matt Lipps: Photography Is Magic Commission: Hands, 2015

This work was created as part of the Photography Is Magic Commission project curated by Charlotte Cotton. 

Matt Lipps reanimates historical photography into sculptural forms to create imaginative constellations of photographic references. Relying on our collective image memory banks of popular and iconic photographs, Lipps’s practice mimics the way the Web releases photographic images from their original contexts, meanings, and cultural statuses, instead showing photography to be a fluid material. Lipps created this work in response to the idea of “sleight of hand,” both referring to the dexterity of the magician and the absence of the artist’s hand in the process of combining existing photographic images.

“My practice begins with the construction of three-dimensional tableaux of imagery appropriated from popular and high culture, alongside vernacular photographs and my personal collection of negatives. Using collage strategies, I cut out fragments from this idiosyncratic archive and make freestanding paper dolls, which are displayed according to sculptural tropes and theater staging, as well as intuitive organization. These redeployed elements act as visual prompts, playing on viewers’ visual literacy; they point to various moments from our history with the past 170 years of the disseminated image. The resulting constructions are rephotographed and printed at a much larger size than the originals, thereby creating scale shifts that inspire reflection about the operation of the photographic objects on the embodied surface.”—Matt Lipps

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