We live in a world of rapidly evolving images, in which it becomes more and more difficult to tell the actual from the virtual. Walking in Times Square, one becomes aware of being a tiny element in a vast kinetic collageof merging not only with the multitudes of fellow human beings and multicolored traffic but with the flickering images adorning the huge digital billboards towering all around.
It is this multiplicity, this crazy simultaneity that Alex Hiam apprehends in his large format limited edition photographic collages, with their cinematic juxtapositions of body parts, architectural details, and various other facets of our daily environment, presented within dynamic geometric compositions, featured in Tripping the Light Fantastic: The Fine Art Photography Exhibition, at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, in Chelsea, from March 16 through April 6. (Reception: Thursday, March 22, from 6 to 8 PM.)
Unlike many other artists at work today, Hiam does not create his compositions on Photoshop. Rather, they are realized through means of traditional photography combined with painting, and drawing, which gives them a tactile richness and immediacy more akin to the collages of Romare Bearden than to most digital imagery. At times, Hiam even photographs his own oil paintings and includes them in his collages, combining them with images from his extensive collection of 18th century lithographs to create striking visual juxtapositions.
An accomplished designer and writer as well as a fine artist, Hiam, who studied art at Harvard University, photographs models in his studio and integrates them into his compositions, reflecting his background in advertising and media, and also signifying how such images have been thoroughly woven into the fabric of everyday reality.
In Hiam's "Composite Memories", for example, glamorous lips are juxtaposed in sensual harmony with fragmented visions of shapely feminine body parts, while in "Sill Silhouette", the single shadow-figure of a beautiful woman is seen in profile, set against light streaming in through a window. Other works, such as the oil on Masonite "Stone Takes Flight" involve a more complex variety of sequential imagery, while digital prints such as "Life as We Know it" and "The Geometry of Passion" verge on complete abstraction by virtue of Hiam¹s ability to combine severely cropped close up images in a manner that imbues them with an inexplicable sense of mystery.
Fragmentation in art has been a given ever since the Cubists began to evolve a new language for reflecting the already quickening pace of modern life in the early 20th-century. That speedy pace has continued to accelerate to the point where we are constantly bombarded today by a plethora of images occurring in rapid succession, not only in Times Square, as alluded to at the onset of this review, but everywhere we go.
These images, emanating from billboards, computer screens, MTV and a thousand other sources, seduce and distract us to a degree where some cultural critics have argued that we are in danger of having our attention span obliterated under their unceasing assault.
What Alex Hiam accomplishes in his photographic collages is to impose a new order on this chaotic visual cacophony by virtue of his ability to bring disparate images into aesthetic harmony in a manner that suggests a new classical vision for the postmodern era. .
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