MAZE12
©2013 Craig Ashby
7.75” x 9.375”
Collage

Number eleven in the MAZE features my favorite current model Freja Beha Erichsen in a Gucci fragrance campaign and a panel from The Dark Knight Returns given to me by Don Lashley a million years ago. This is one of three, including the piece before and the one after, that use double-sided adhesive. I will explain in the next entry why that ended abruptly.

This is another example of the cutter going horribly wrong. Panels one and four are both replacements of the originally intended crops. I wish it had turned out with the elegance of the first MAZE. But working with the cutter hasn’t allowed for that.

There have been moments when I have seen such despair during this series. I have such great plans for the cutter and then it performs poorly and I can’t see it doing the things I need done. Then I just want to stop doing the series and move on and then I remember the ideas that caused me to purchase the cutter in the first place and I pick myself up and continue on.

So what is the next idea that I am struggling to make happen? I want precise cuts on two of the same image, offset to expand the original into a futurist cut-up collage. But what happens when I only have two originals and one of them is mangled by the machine?

The options are to buy more than two images, which would be cost prohibitive, but perhaps necessary. Or copy the image, which feels like cheating. I guess cheating would be better than not dealing with the problem and rolling in failure.