dis '94

dis - prefix 1. Absence of 2. Freedom from / 1994

C-41 Prints from B&W film negatives - 19 / 18" x 14"

Kim Borst

This body of images addresses my rediscovering the magic of intuitive image making. Underlying the importance of that was a need to overcome, combat if you will, the vague disconnect I was feeling about my present existence and what lay ahead. This work began when a friend allowed me the use of a number of poorly taxidermied wild and domesticated animals and another friend allowed me access to classrooms in an old elementary school building. The focus of my concept was to convey unknown rituals that addressed the irony of the civilized but instinctually primal animal existing in structured civilization. It was of great importance to make these images intuitively avoiding any pre-visualization and pre-meditation of content and composition. I would arrange for artist and musician friends to meet me at the old school and I would arrive with a van full of assorted props including the sadly taxidermied animals. I would then establish an area of a particular classroom as a stage for a ritual like event adorning, posing, and directing my live and dead subjects.

All of these images were wrought from black and white film printed with a color enlarger, using C-41 chemistry and C-41 color photographic paper. The exposures were done in three stages introducing plastic plant dodge tools and various colors of acetate as well as changing the color filtration pack in the enlarger. Working intuitively allowed me to rediscover the magic of image making that occurred when I first became an art student in photography. Back then making pictures with a camera quickly became a passionate endeavor. As I like to phrase it “I had an epiphany that picture making provided me with a new voice; a voice that made me anxious and motivated to get my ass out of bed in the morning!”