THE WEEK IN PICTURES

The Week in Pictures is a series of unique analogue C-prints. In each image, a silhouetted shape floats against a differently colored background, slightly offset as though torn out, which creates echoing contours of white negative space or darker overlapping. With only this barebones figure/ground relationship, the images appear to be completely abstract.  Each shape is derived from loose sketches drawn on paper by Corona Benjamin, inspired by non "professional" photographs of objects listed for sale online through resale web sites such as eBay, Mercado Libre and Pennysaver. When she finds an appealing shape, the artist then stencils it onto an 40 inch paper cutout and takes the stencil into her color darkroom to be used as a series of scaled and layered negatives. This process of extraction “frees” the shape from its market status and transforms it into a anonymous picture—photographic and figural, yet devoid of the usual features associated with traditional depictive photography, such as narrative detail, central theme, point of focus or depth of field. Conceptually, this process of abstraction echoes the way individual consumers have taken strategic global branding into their own hands by re-photographing a luxury product themselves and independently offering it for resale in the virtual second-hand marketplace, thus circumventing traditionally controlled points of trade and bypassing a central authority on the definition of worth. Thereby, by creating her own rebranding scheme and offering her newly transformed pictorial “products” in a completely different market, Corona Benjamin considers the alienation of the original designer from the finished object, and a tension between the artisanal and the industrial.