For the past three years, I have been investigating the manipulation and recombination of traditional photographic negatives. I began by digitizing images from an extended series of face cast studies. Altering expression, skin surface, and certain design elements, I sought to blur the distinctions that separate a portrait representation from a more sculptural life mask. In these images the casts and the photographs interweave their factual clues. An intentional reference is made to the delicate state that exists between life and death. Manipulated through photographic translation, however, the prints give little or no reliable concrete information. When all is said and done, the images are simply a testament to the beauty and sensuality of process and form.

Several ideas relating to the digital blending of sculpture and flesh used in the life cast pieces have fueled the creation of a second body of work focusing on the metamorphosis of sculpture into flesh and flesh into sculpture. For this work I have been using the computer to explore previously abandoned photographic efforts. My intention has been to search for threads of consistency that have run throughout my career and that have not been fully realized. Revisiting earlier figure work, I have looked for a sensibility shared over time in terms of figure poses and the use of the human form. Many of the resulting images blend photographs of classical sculpture with nude figure studies. I often combine negatives from different places, times, and references. While assembling elements dissimilar in scale and perspective, I seek to replicate the integrity of a conventional photograph. The figure work has revealed certain harmonies that underlie our physicality; however, more often than not, the message relayed by these images conveys the shortcomings of our "unclassically" proportioned bodies and the fleeting nature of our physical existence.

Alida Fish