Gary Carsley

Gary Carsley’s work hybridizes traditional artistic media, such as painting, photography, and drawing, with digital and immersive technologies in order to engage with globalization and other contemporary political and cultural topics. He is particularly interested in the handmade as a way to resist uniformity. To make these “draguerreotypes,” as he calls them, Carsley takes photographs of parks from around the world, such as this image of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Then, working with a vast archive of digital copies of wood grain veneers purchased from hardware stores in different countries, he creates a collaged image of that place, fragment by fragment. While the resulting work may look like intarsia—the decorative wood process in which a design or pattern is made by assembling small pieces of veneer in various shapes—it is actually a photographic monoprint composed of digital copies, leaving the viewer to question what is “natural.”