matthewbroadhead:

Jared Ragland

Everything is Going to be All Right, 2015

Jared takes the commonplace and recontextualizes it in conceptual narratives that require contemplative analysis and deep viewing practices. Often fluctuating in feeling between intimacy and distance, private and public, realism and metaphor, the duality present in Ragland’s work is enhanced by his art-making technique, which combines the technologically advanced with the handmade.

For instance, in his forthcoming book Everything is Going to Be All Right, Jared employs both traditional black and white photography as well as appropriated imagery that was digitally sourced to produce a meditation on Percy’s The Moviegoer that dissolves boundaries of space, place, and time yet maintains a consistent emotional sensibility.  A large portion of Ragland’s other work likewise incorporates images from online archives, electronic photographic databases, and Google image searches. This is yet another way that Jared challenges traditional notions of authorship and artist agency: by borrowing images from the past and combining them with his own photographic production.