Like Marcel Duchamp, I am fascinated with transition, change, and movement. My photographs, taken in New York City and Washington, DC, pay homage to Duchamp and his determination to go his own way, discovering something entirely his own - a sense of movement through a series of successive descending positions.
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About the inspiration:
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French-American painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist . Along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, he helped define revolutionary developments in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
In his early work, he emulated the compositions and brushstrokes of Cézanne, but in Paris he came in contact with avant-garde writers and poets, and his painting shifted to incorporate elements of the fragmented style of Cubism, though not a Cubist himself. This influence, and his interest in the photographic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, resulted in his best-known painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2”.
Duchamp tried to show the work at the Salon des Indepéndants in Paris, but the title, inscribed on the canvas (NU DESCENDANT UN ESCALIER”), was objected to and he withdrew his submission. When it was shown at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, the work gained critical opposition and his name and reputation became forever associated with this painting.
By World War I, he rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art - art he believed was intended only to engage the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted art to serve the mind rather than be purely visual and commercial.
Eventually, he left painting behind, becoming a cult figure among the avant-garde, both in Europe and the USA. He is seen as perhaps the most important figure to affect the shift towards conceptual art and changed what we think about art and what art can be in the 20th century.