The history of art is a history of reuse. The Layered Image explores this history of the reuse of mechanically reproduced images, both through photography and digital reproduction. Before the advent of instant reproduction and the easy remix, reuse occurred when artists borrowed conventions or cited gestures and compositions from other works of art. This exhibition situates reuse as a brand new term. Rather than appropriating images directly, reuse art takes a portion or even the whole reproduction of an existing work, and places it into a new image in order to alter and expand upon the significance of the original. Walter Benjamin says that the aura of a work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, but how is the aura regenerated when a mechanically reproduced image is co-opted into a new original? The digital nature of the exhibition further enhances our definition of reuse. Do these digital reproductions of a new work inherently lack aura? Do they resituate the aura? Or create an entirely new one? This collection of contemporary works demonstrates that the recent shift toward technologies of digital reproduction has allowed artists to lift exact images of the original and layer them to create new works.
Drawn almost exclusively from the Five Colleges Museum Consortium collection, these works span a variety of mediums drawn from the past fifty years. The artworks in The Layered Image survey instances of reuse from the everyday and mass produced images to the so-called high art of canonized works of art. In this exhibition, a pop art cartoon image of Felix the Cat interacts with a photo recontextualizing the ubiquitous image of Mona Lisa, forcing the viewer to confront their own preconceived notions of what reuse might mean. The history of repositioning and restating images is seen in mass produced pop culture images from Warhol’s screenprinted soup cans to photo collage citing mid century advertisements.
The Layered Image, then, situates the term reuse in its reflective role. All of the images in our collection—original, borrowed, remade and reshaped—are intentionally put into conversation as new work. Our curatorial process is itself an example of how to put reused images into dialogue in order to enable new meaning and new modes of critique.