Red's Kingdom

Perhaps like many of us now, I have a collection of odd things left over from previous Kick-Abouts; for example, a latex mask of a rather stern-looking older man, last seen in these Harry Clarke-inspired photographs produced for The Kick-About No.91. It occurred to me I could use the rubbery deformations of this mask as the subject for riffing on Fernando Botero’s ballooning of the human face. 

These images began with the act of scanning the mask and then taking those scans into Premiere Pro (video editing software), where there’s one particular technique (intended for working in Virtual Reality), that enables you to play with a flat image plane as if it were in a three-dimensional space. The short version is I was able to further develop the in-scan distortions of this rubbery face. The resulting images are a long way from the whimsy of some of Botero’s portraits – prompt for The Kick-About No.98 – but find some association perhaps with the monstering of his Abu Ghraib paintings.