Breaking up is hard to do. So is falling in love. Matthew Swarts has been pondering this since splitting up with a long-term girlfriend in 2013 and then finding a new one last year.
To process the strong, often conflicting emotions that come with these changes, Swart is working on two photo series. In Beth, he manipulates old photos of his ex-girlfriend so she slowly fades from view. In The Alternatives, he manipulates images of his new girlfriend to represent the complicated process of forging a new bond.
"The photos became a way of dealing with loss and the psychological state that I was working through in the new relationship,” he says.
To abstract the original photos, shot with everything from an iPhone to a DSLR, Swarts uses Photoshop to create a pattern with images gleaned from the Internet---optical illusions, children’s illustrations, architectural papers and the like. He overlays this pattern on the original photo, sometimes blending several layers and deleting others to leave digital imprints. The result is mind-bending imagery with a strange, psychedelic melancholy. The woman is present, but shrouded.
In Beth, slowly erasing his ex-girlfriend is a metaphor for loss, but it’s also about ownership. The original portraits were a collaborative process in which she posed for, or allowed him to take, the photo. Now that she’s gone, he doesn’t feel the same ownership and is trying to make the photos his own to respect the breakup and his ex.
“I wanted to turn the images into new work, so I manipulated them to such a great extent that by some exacting standard of the copyright law I could defend them,” he says.
In The Alternatives, the blurred, obscured images are a metaphor for the uncertainty and complexity of forging a new relationship. Although emotions are strong at the dawn of a new romance, there are nagging questions about whether things will work out.
“There are issues like, 'Is this person feeling the same kind of longing and love that I’m projecting onto them or is this some kind of optical illusion?'” he says.
Swarts often makes enormous prints of 40 by 60 inches, which are so detailed that you can see the original images he used to create the patterns overlaying the portrait. This is intentional, and meant to convey the many layers of emotion he’s experienced, particularly about the new relationship. The two of them have been together for about a year, and though things are going well, Swarts says he's been around long enough to know nothing is ever straightforward when love is involved.
“I like having multiple levels of perceptual awareness because those multiple views mirror the alternatives in reality,” he says. “Or in other words, I’m using these digital tools and photography to reconstruct my consciousness.”
Images from both Beth and The Alternatives will appear at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles from March 7 through April 18.
