John Stezaker in conversation with Michael Bracewell
Friday 10 July 2015 6.30 - 7.30pm
Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts
£16 (includes exhibition entry). £12 (event only). Concessions available.
Friends of the RA book first
Joseph Cornell
Artist John Stezaker discusses with writer Michael Bracewell the relationship between the work of Joseph Cornell and his own artistic practice, in particular the disquieting juxtapositions of found photographic imagery.
John Stezaker (b.1949) is a leading artist in modern photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, postcards and other printed material, Stezaker creates seductive and fascinating small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism and found art. His manipulation of photographic images enables juxtapositions and sequencing of imagery that examines the processes of seeing, and the viewer, as much as the images themselves.
During this event, John Stezaker discusses his work in relation to artist Joseph Cornell, a prominent exponent of collage and assemblage, from his selection and manipulation of photographic images to collages and film. British writer, novelist and critic Michael Bracewell guides this discussion.
All tickets include a drink following the event.
Disquieting, poetic, compelling, romantic, inscrutable, glamorous and strange, Stezaker's re-arrangement and intervention into the virtually infinite resource of mass imagery conflates aesthetics, psychology, cultural and visual theory. In this his work resembles nothing less than a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness – a 'lectio divina' of semiotics, creating both new experiences of looking and seeing, and enabling renewed understanding of artists and thinkers as diverse as Baudelaire, Jung and Warhol.
Michael Bracewell