Zelda Zinn

Transformer

2024/2012
This series continues to explore my long-term interests in materials, and the tension between representation and abstraction. Here, again, I am engaged in making images from pre-recycled goods. I have raided the paper shredder, and fashioned the uniform strips into small sculptures. The profusion of lines generated by the cutting made each composition feel energetic and emphatic, like an exclamation mark.

Gravitating toward the colorful bits, I decided to saturate the mix by shredding magazine photos I liked from among our recycle pile. These pictures became my color/image palette. I crumpled and molded the accumulations of shreds until they felt right.

Removing the paper wads to my studio, I arranged, lit, and shot them. As I began to photograph the compositions, I was amazed to see how the little forms became objects. As 2-d photographs, they were transformed; images of flimsy paper became a strange hybrid of found and made object, open to interpretation based on the viewer’s experience and imagination.