John Houck is a Los Angeles-based artist who makes his images through a systematic re-photographing that produces a complex set of relationships between figure and ground and defies a clear understanding of the real and created.
In this process, he takes a set of objects (often with personal meaning) and captures them multiple times. With each iteration, the objects are repositioned atop of their own images. The resultant work is a kind of photograph of itself, seen through a multitude of perspectives.
The unfixed nature of Houck’s compositions is further complicated by the artist’s introduction of painterly mark-making, which he incorporates in both the objects being photographed and the photographs themselves. These actions transform the photograph into a screen through which the composition is gradually developed, examined, and remade.
