#keith cottingham

[refojito-blog]

1999 History Re-Purposed: Female Adult Profile / Female Adult Frontal

[n-e-a-t]

History Re-Purposed (1999) By: Keith Cottingham

Within Keith Cottingham's creations in History Re-Purposed, he creates a completely invented existence placed in a period of time that is becomes a mix of the past, present, and imaginary. Cottingham utilized portraits of numerous individuals, documentary source material, architectural details, and animal and botanical still lifes as ways to replicate collections of nineteenth century ethnographic studies as well as proving the subtle inconsistencies of the aforementioned studies. By entirely fabricating these images, Cottingham allows for these images to now be in "no place, be of no time, and of no body". These images stand to project an illusion of truth as well as bringing into question the validity of historical authenticity as with these fictitious creations does. He shows that archiving and memory fail us and that reality is not simply a collection of objective images but that these produced images are proof of how we as humans interpret the past without fully realizing how we revise and rationalize it. 

Posted by: Lindsey Chu