Harvest: Hidin' From the Hair cut, Amongst the Sweet Corn

Kelly Bigelow Becerra
“HARVEST: HIDIN’ FROM THE HAIR CUT, AMONGST THE SWEET CORN
Paper Construction, 2006
Archival Color prints
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Kelly Bigelow Becerra’s digital compositions get their surreal and sometimes spooky sensibility, in part from the unusual process by which they are made. Becerra scans every single object or surface she wants to use in a composition. This includes the faces of family members, their clothing, and even the grass outside her family home. This use of a scanner as a camera allows her to combine a one-to-one truthfulness with the total artifice achieved through cutting and pasting into an image.

Her final compositions often use an organizational structure much like that of an American sampler, an art form made popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Young women stitched these small-scale compositions to demonstrate their skill, but in the process they also recorded their own histories. In these series of works, Becerra “stitches together” moments of her awkward and sometimes violent childhood in rural Michigan.

Statement from: Radius: Emerging Artist Exhibition Brochure –2005
J H, Curatorial Director,The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum