In Donald Farnsworth’s Standing Figure series, he employs digitally manipulated collage as a means of seamlessly melding images from the ancient past with elements of contemporary life… In [Standing Figure], a female figure stands against a velvety, black background. The figure is that of a classical statue that is missing her extremities. In place of the Statue’s missing limbs is a pair of ghostly human arms and legs. Farnsworth has likewise altered the body of the statue, replacing the original smooth marble with a surface that is mottled with contemporary graffiti and parts of an old doorway: a latch, lock, wooden beam and peeling paint. By layering the details and textures of contemporary tagging and graffiti with the world of antiquity, Farnsworth pulls the figure from the past into the present.
The imagery employed in the Standing Figure suite was collected by the artist while traveling in both Europe and the United States from 1994 to the present. Using the camera as a visual note-taking device, Farnsworth recorded various images that caught his eye: textures, forms, trees, graffiti, sculpture and architecture. Back in the studio, Farnsworth sorted through these notes and began combining and collaging them in order to create an image that would bring his notes of inspiration together into a new, composite form. The precursors to the Standing Figure series were images derived from figures photographed by the artist in the British Museum, the Louvre and other sites, which Farnsworth later manipulated with the traditional printmaking techniques (chine collé, etching and collage) that have played an important role in his work to date. In the Standing Figure series, however, Farnsworth has moved the entire collage process to the computer. Just as he had done earlier on the printing press, Farnsworth layered, manipulated, and adjusted his photographs and textural elements on the computer to achieve a striking visual form with exquisite precision and delicacy. The resulting prints are palimpsests of information and imagery, [in which] Farnsworth questions with an elegant economy of means why artifacts like the standing figure remain compelling to artist and viewer alike. He subtly asks us to consider what it means for the contemporary being to create in and inhabit a world in which our experience of the present remains heavily informed by our relationship to the past.
-- Alexsandr Rossman
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