Alex Rose

 

Alex Rose’s work reminds me of Lucas Simoes’ photographic pieces. But Rose has taken a softer approach, using photographs and pencil sketches to build up a visual feeling of an particular individual, and then gently begins to remove them from our memory. His work is just as provocative as Simoes’ and again, i love the use of eroding the figure, enhancing a sense of loss within the image. But his work holds a tenderness that i find really endearing. The people in the pieces seem to lament with the viewer this loss of self and bestows on the audience a kind of dramatic irony. That we can all unite in this inevitable fading of life. It made me think not only in terms of collage, but using particular materials like pencil and charcoal, substances that fade in time, and if touched, would lose their magnitude and presence. I tried to use this in my animation so that the material themselves act as a statement of decay and fading of the physical form. Then to cut away at the image would provoke this theme further. But Rose manages to maintain a delicate aesthetic that plays well with my concept, and i feel i can take a lot from this series, and use it both in my collage and animation.

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