Now that our government has finally conceded that we are in a recession (depression?) it is exciting and lovely to find brilliant artwork that you can actually afford. Oliver Wasow’s Expansible Catalog; loosely based on Wallace Nutting’s 1915 catalog of the same name, is just such a body of work.
About his constantly updated site of artworks – sold in limited edition prints and priced between 10 and 100 dollars – Wasow has said:
“I enjoy the practice of accumulating, indexing and categorizing things, especially pictures. I work with a fairly large collection of images, re-shaping them, applying image adjustments, collaging, etc., all towards an end of fairly infinite variations. It’s important though that the images work individually as well, that they function as singular objects of contemplation. They’re made specifically with domestic environments in mind and they need to hold a wall by themselves. In 1915 Nutting published what he called his ‘Expansible Catalog’. It opened at the spine so that retailers could continually add new pages of Nutting’s cheap, hand-colored photographs. At the peak of his popularity Nutting employed 200 hand colorists and its estimated that he sold over 10 million “original” artworks in his lifetime. I think there’s a parallel to be made between Nutting’s practice and the contemporary practice of digital manipulation. Most of my images are to some degree digitally altered, and like most of the images that make up contemporary visual culture, they have as much to do with painting as they do photography. Digital imaging encourages a relationship to image making that is really more about mutation than it is exact replication. I think Nutting would have appreciated this. And of course, as a mass marketer of artwork, he would have appreciated the new models of image distribution offered by the internet”
Don’t miss seeing this work – I think you will appreciate it.
