Chuck Samuels writes:
“In this corpus, my gaze shifts towards appropriation art from the late 1970s to the present. This is a movement that left an indelible impression on my own practice and to which I’ve made a modest contribution over the years. For After, I studied and, in my deferential but tongue-in-cheek style, remade the remakes once again using myself as model. In this way, I hope to better understand, (re-)deconstruct, and share my fascination with the practice of appropriation in post-modern art.
“My research concentrated on the archive of appropriation in/of photography, video and cinema, focusing on works by artists who have worked with pre-existing imagery in a variety of ways. But rather than recreating the original works, in After I have ignored the originals and meticulously studied and recreated the remakes and, by integrating myself within the 14 prints and 4 videos that make up the project, I have doubled up on the ironic distance.”
With the exception of ‘After Gordon’ (a video produced with the support of the Production Assistance Program of OBORO, a centre dedicated to production and presentation of art, contemporary practices and new media), all the works from After were made in the context of a Custom Residency Project at L’imprimerie centre d’artistes. The artist would like to thank OBORO and L’imprimerie for their support.