Colin Strohm is a collagist, photographer, retoucher and recovering printmaker living and working near Green-Wood Cemetery

Remember Fondly this Time of Such Abundant Waste so Magnificently Crafted

These pieces are romantic landscapes - constructions of ruins; piles of garbage and flotsam from life and consumption, for this moment when garbage piles up too fast to be seen as classical or loved nostalgically. Vistas of ghosts, a dream of what we might see at death, after being smothered by all our stuff. Mundane piles become breathtaking, claustrophobic, unnatural spaces.

Important in this work is a fantastical, vertiginous weightlessness at the point where the subjects begin to oscillate back and forth between thing and thinglessness, flipping between the familiar and the arcane, ordinary and mysterious. These pieces are snapshots of the accretions around the human irritant in the oyster of the universe. These objects are photo-based, manipulated digitally, printed, collaged, painted on, photographed, manipulated digitally, printed, collaged… within a self-contained, self-regenerating studio ecosystem. They are cannibals, ouroboroses, the production of one feeding the next, the detritus of the ‘the inextricability of human life and ecology’ (Mackenzie Wark) fueling and burying it all. They are what I imagine we see when we die, encrusted with our accumulations, floating through space.

Corruption of the Day

From January 2017-January 2021, I took the front page of the New York Times and distorted it digitally, either by moving it in a scanner, or through scripted distortions in Processing or Photoshop. As the paper of record (and an avatar of "media" in general), the NYT has been a trusted source of journalism for decades. In recent years, truth is not a matter of record. Do honest journalists striving for integrity become complicit in corrupting the truth by simply reporting events? Things become vertiginous and disorienting, somehow familiar, somewhat legible, but fragmented, beguiling nonsense, both hard to look at and hard to look away from.

Corruption of the Day on Electric Objects (defunct)

#corruptionoftheday on Twitter

Ikea Project

I bought an Ikea couch that came in this huge box, almost as big as the apartment I was living in. I cut it in to manageable size pieces and made collages out of it and all the other packaging from that trip. When I used all the materials, the project was complete.

Cardboard, pastel, collage 2000-2002, 8.5"x11"-ish

Blue Paintings

In an effort to make the marginalized sublime, I applied a Photoshop action I wrote to free porn images to make them into hard-edged abstractions. These I printed on canvas and re-painted in oil. At some point I got bored doing paint-by-numbers and started pouring beer or pissing on the unpainted canvases, making them washy, color fields. I then started applying the same action to the actresses faces, which became a series called “Gaze.” This led to a series of “Drip Paintings,” collages of cumshots extracted from the same source material.

Oil on Iris on canvas &
Iris on canvas
1998-2001, 24”x24”, 20”x20”, 30'“x40”

Cat Paintings

While working making Iris prints, I collected the weekly calibration tests. The inks were water soluble. These prints I laid on the floor with 5 cups of water, one in each corner and one in the center, to correspond to the 5 Dhyani buddhas, one for each of the cardinal directions and one for the center. These pieces are the results after my cats knocked over the cups. Concurrently I made a series of drip paintings by tacking test prints to the wall and spraying them with water.

Iris prints, 1999, 46"x34"