Kristan Horton uses a more experimental approach to his photography, with a heavy ‘need to speculate how photography affects knowledge’ (Frieze). Horton is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in sculpture, drawing, photography and video, while suing layered processes in both material and virtual. His primary source of his investigations are that of everyday objects, often superimposing several images together, in order that they were taken, to create a dynamic and multilayered ‘composite of perspectives within a single frame’.
There is sometimes a nonsense dialogue that happens in his works, keeping him in dialogue with the Modernist past, as well as reminiscent of Futurist, Cubist and Dada works. “However, it is Horton’s insertion of sheets of malleable plastic into the compositional mix that allows for an assertively contemporary and serious investigation of perceptual phenomena associated with image transparency, opacity, reflection and degradation – and with the descriptive limits of digital technology” (Frieze). Horton’s work offer surprising hints of the unexplained while dutifully testing the representational limits of technology.
When viewing two of his works at the National Gallery, Ottawa, each time you would walk by the prints, there would be something new to see and to study. Due to the expanse of layers within the piece, I don’t believe that I have seen each one, and they mould and disperse into one another.
Charlotte Abraham Art 