im Kazanjian (Los Angeles, 1968) received his MFA from the Art Center College of Design in ’92. His BFA was completed at the Kansas City Art Institute in ’90. He has worked professionally as a commercial CGI artist for the past 16 years in television and game production. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. His body of work consists of crisply composed digital images that explore the surrealist side of space and architecture: “I am interested in how an image can have the potential to unfold and suggest something outside of itself. By this I mean something beyond the obvious and only discovered through a continued process of viewing. It is this act of “looking” that I find fascinating because it does not follow a linear progression like language but is interactive and random. I’ve focused on photography as a medium because of the cultural misunderstanding that it has a kind of built-in objectivity. This allows me to set up a visual tension within my work, to make it resonate and lure the viewer further inside. My current body of work is inspired in large part by the literature of H.P. Lovecraft and other “weird” fiction writers. I am intrigued with the narrative archetypes they utilize to de-familiarize the familiar. I like to use those devices as a foundation to build upon and generate entry points for my images. My images are digitally manipulated composites made from photographs I find online. Currently, I have an archive of over 26 thousand high resolution photographs. The number of found photos I use to make a piece can vary from 12 to 30. On a couple of my more complex images I’ve used over 50. I generally sample sections from photographs I find interesting and then use them as building blocks. I assemble these “blocks” together in Photoshop to create a nonexistent space that mimics a photograph. I do not use a camera at any stage in the process.”

Kazanjian home page