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In late 2020, Bolton began publishing a series of new archival pigment print editions on paper selected from hundreds of experimental digital images made during this disruptive period of post-truth spectacles and alternative realities — an unreal time when the lines between truth vs. fiction and the fake vs. the real have become permanently erased.
As the number of his new print editions has grown to over 1000, Bolton has organized this work into four overlapping sections: I. UNREAL, II. NATURA MORTA, III. ANALOGIES (2020-2022), IV. ANALOGIES (2023), and V. ANALOGIES (2024). This ongoing series of prints marks a shift in Bolton’s long-term investigation of fabricated images and visual narratives. For Bolton, images act as coded visual signals that are transmitted, received, and then interpreted as representations of reality. While images can and do serve as symbolic or metaphorical representations of how we perceive reality, they can also distort and misrepresent the real world, becoming the mere illusory ‘shadows’ described in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
As in his previous print-based work, these new archival pigment prints are derived from digitally altered iPhone photographs and appropriated images. In this initial series, I. UNREAL, most of the images begin with outdoor photos of the kind of forlorn-looking objects that litter our everyday landscape and act as anthropomorphic symbols of a bygone human presence. With an associative narrative intent, these starkly iconic images are presented in darkly rich, noir-like cinematic tones and set within a fictional, digitally altered version of the ‘real’.
In making these archival pigment prints, Bolton has developed an all-digital working and printing process. After the initial iPhone photos and appropriated images are uploaded, they are then deconstructed and reassembled to make new images that bear an uncanny resemblance to real life. Resembling printouts of corrupted digital files, these new pigment prints display their purely digital origins and means of production through applied layers of glitch filter effects that introduce chance and random RGB shifts, shakes, slices, scan lines, double exposures, and distortions.
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