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As the number of his new print editions has grown to over 1000, Bolton has organized this work into five 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 second series, II. NATURA MORTA, the images begin with indoor, in-studio snapshots of still-life tableaus arranged from an assortment of the handmade, cast-object multiples (including stumps, logs, broken branches, boards, bricks, traffic cones, packing peanuts, etc.) that Bolton used in his earlier large-scale, sculptural print installations. Without a specific narrative intent, these informal still-life 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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