Digital pictures enlarged to the size of a wall

Brett Wexler has created giant, enlarged, highly detailed wall art size images resembling snap shot photographs using a small hand held camera. He uses multiple images and panorama software from Hugin, Adobe Photoshop and others to stitch them together. He styles them to look like or have the visual code of a snapshot from a point-and-shoot camera. Then he adds surreal color, hybrid, sometimes appropriated images and ultimately a social message or comment, often satirical.

Nevelson, Rodin, Viet Nam forge Brett Wexler's Landscapes

In 1968 Brett Wexler was profoundly moved by Louise Nevelson's sculpture the Gates to the Warsaw Ghetto, stylistically appropriated from Rodin's Gates to Hell. With his Minolta, he snapped a head-on portrait type photo of the towering wall sized black wooden assemblage. In 1970, while involved with the Viet Nam War, to soothe himself, Brett began his first experiment which would evolve into the pics in this gallery. Shrouded in the darkness of midnight, he taped 70 pieces of 8"x10" silver bromide paper on his wall to form the equivalent of a large format exhibition print 5 feet wide. Then he focused his Bogen enlarger at the wall to expose the prints. He removed the printing papers and meticulously developed each of them indentically. Finally he remounted the finished prints on his wall like a giant jig saw puzzle. There it was, another Gates to another kind of hell.

Computer software explodes creativity

Now, no longer bound by the imperious power of a light-based enlarger, Brett Wexler uses a tripod or his finger, balancing the center of his Canon digital camera's telephoto lens so it pivots, and then takes hundreds of detailed closeup images of his quest. As Louise Nevelson merged her many found objects into single grey or white units, so too, Brett Wexler uses computer based software to merge dozens and dozens of fragments of his object into a whole, symbolizing society's merger of the many fragments of structures and people into its fabric. And, commenting on society with its hypocracy and quasi-reality, Wexler then weaves external objects and images into the landscape at hand. The file sizes range from 1 to 2 Gigabytes and take weeks of creative time to produce. It was for this time-based reason that artist David Hockney said he stopped doing photomontages and went back to painting: it was too hard to make a living spending so much time on one work.

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