MAZE05
©2012 Craig Ashby
7.75” x 9.375”
Collage

MAZE05 is, you guessed it, the fifth in the MAZE Series. When Ernesto Repetto first saw the piece he named the style with a single word. All night I have tried to remember that word. It was perfect and I must learn to write more things down.

This piece’s conceit is to use four images from the same editorial shoot to increase the difficulty of reading the maze. You will see more of this idea and hopefully with more success. I like the aggressiveness of this piece but don’t love it overall.

With such a simple and repetitive idea more imagery needs to take place for the cut-up process to work. As a whole it does make the eye and mind work. The over stylized and over saturated fashion shoot takes awhile to comprehend. This is a positive.

There were many problems making this one. One of the cuts went horribly wrong. The plotter/cutter chewed it up so I had to cut another crop from the same editorial. Then cut a whole one again. This continues throughout the series. Some have been a nightmare with as many as 7 crops to complete one four block set.

Speaking of nightmare, do you notice the two red parallelograms in number 4 that should have been separated or cut again? It’s a balance between patience and rushing to beat the drying of the adhesive. The mirror flipping doesn’t help at all.

Other times I have been able to cut a single piece here and there. Modifying the EPS file to cut the items I needed. Did I mention that the company that made the plotter/cutter charged fifty bucks for software that would allow me to import my own EPS files? Software that replaced a free plugin that worked natively from Illustrator on the previous model.