My newest series, No Regretting; No Regressing, was inspired by a course I took at Chicago Botanic Garden by instructor Iris Lutz about the Bauhaus School of Design.
Bauhaus was a creative design movement in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the signature techniques of the movement was Fotoplastik, a method of overlaying, manipulating, and superimposing images to create new, layered works of art. A major contributor to this method was Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who described that by combining photographically represented objects with lines and other additions, one creates a piece that goes beyond the meaning of the individual parts. This piece can be amusing, poignant, devastating, satirical, visionary, and/or revolutionary in its results.
I chose to explore the Fotoplastik technique in my series “NO Regretting; NO Regressing” to capture the unsettled nature of society both in the 1930s and now. We are living in a time when human rights laws that have been in place for half a century are being overturned, and lawmakers are upending the lives of our daughters and granddaughters by taking away rights that we fought for in our youth. As a woman growing up in the 1960s and 70s I wanted to express my fears and frustration. This series is my call to action for us to continue the fight we thought we won. We should have no regrets, and we should have no regressing to an archaic way of thinking.
Check out this series on my Projects page.
~ Jody