Photography and photo-based images have always been a part of my artistic practice. Although I was trained in traditional and digital photography, I prefer finding to creating images. In my series, “101 Portraits,” I made portraits of well-known celebrities, politicians, religious and sport figures using the first 101 images found on Google when searching each subject's name. Converting the 101 “found” jpegs to 1% opacity, I layered them one upon the other until a kind of abstract and subtle "meta-portrait" emerged. The portraits are time-based since each Google search, done on a certain day, will always yield a unique result.

In my series, “Hot!” I was interested in how art is perceived and valued in our society, so I scoured porn websites for explicit images where famous artwork was in the background as a utilitarian object, an absurd afterthought. I used those images with no other manipulation than to crop them in a way to call attention to the background artwork and minimize the sexual acts. In these prints, the sex is deleted and the bodies are incidental, intruding little upon our view of the art.

My recent collage work is made by appropriating photographs of iconic artworks from different art historical periods that I mine from books, auction catalogs, and magazines. I scan the images and reprint them on a large-scale ink jet printer, selecting specific parts that draw me to their shapes, colors and textures. Cutting, arranging and re-arranging, I play with their complementary and contrasting attributes and create surprising, lyrical and visually confounding new compositions. I am often amazed at what results from the simple juxtaposition of unrelated forms. It is as if I have released some kind of latent energy in the original photographs.

~ Ray Beldner