Click to visit portfolio pages

Artist Statement, Camille S. Jungman

My work is best approached from a non-Darwinian evolutionary theory.  The belief that an artist should strive to create one body of work which evolves over a period of time, in a linear fashion, and the belief that this is the only way to embody an individual vision in one’s work, should be challenged.  In fact, this older Darwinian model of the evolution of a style can constrain the vision of an individual artist.  Although this is the method of evaluating art work that is favored by galleries, museums, and most of all, by art academies, it is a limiting concept by which to approach absolutely everyone’s work. 

The coherence in my work of different, but absolutely related, portfolios comes from the fact that I have proceeded, in my work, from the power of mutability.  Just as nature can be understood as proceeding by leaps from one system to another, like thoughts in the human mind, so can the creation of an oeuvre of artwork as well.  Since constriction can be debilitating to both nature and to the creation of art, everything, including a body of work, is vitalized when it is allowed to shift and mature.

This idea of creation is natural for me as an artist because the chief element in the aesthetics of my various photography portfolios is collage.  I believe strongly in the power of juxtaposition, in the capacities of collage for creating variable effects and multiple meanings.   I enjoy putting this with that and exploring how best to generate and capitalize on the sparks of recognition and sense experiences that can fly from a particular confrontation of elements.  I understand my challenge to be one of convincing my viewers that it would be impossible to imagine any other juxtapositions than the ones they are being confronted with, here and now, in any one of my pieces, and, furthermore, that it would be impossible to imagine the elements that I have joined together separated in any way from one another.

In all of my portfolios of photographs, the main strategy employed in creating the images is the juxtaposition of ordinary things with other ordinary things, in order to transcend the ordinary.  The diverse nature of the iconography is important in the way it encompasses the things I have intuitively collected, picked up, and cut out of the mass media over the years and juxtaposed so often with images of myself.   Of course, I could put any two things together and create almost always a startling image of some sort.  The challenge is to avoid the banal, the merely amusing, and to create interesting, funny, thought-provoking, and even disturbing images.

The best way, I believe, to facilitate creation of these types of images is to produce a diverse and extensive range of work in many different portfolios.  In other words, I hope that a viewer might be enabled to juxtapose not only the elements within an individual print, or even juxtapose different prints in the same portfolio, but also to play one whole portfolio off against another.  As Briony Fer argues in her essay on “Surrealism, Myth, and Psychoanalysis,” the ideas of diversity and difference are central to the character of Surrealism.  In Surrealism there is inherently a constantly shifting terrain of representation that constantly uses difference to generate meaning.

A good collage, then, is one where the disconnected or unrelated parts seem to make up a perfectly viable, right, combination, while, at the same time, the parts retain their disparities.  When this is accomplished in a collage, it is because things are combined in the work according to their inner psychic symbolism.  Juxtapositions can reveal or objectify, therefore, something that was there all along, but of which we were previously unconscious.  Collages thus can be truly magical in evoking surprise, which Apollinaire, a poet closely associated with Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, has said is the most important thing that art can offer us.  So often, in a good collage, Apollinaire’s surprise is of the marvelous way that invisible things about reality are made visible.  There are more things invisible than visible in the universe.  The human mind has always circled around these things, but as far as describing them, it is only art than do so.