This piece, titled Generation Lost, is an amalgamation of several concepts and processes that I’ve been exploring for many months. The source imagery for this print’s key image derives from my photographic work—primarily focusing on portraiture and body language. These sources were run through an abstraction process of tracing, minimizing, and collaging. This procedure as a whole is centered around re-contextualization and visual story telling—premised on the viewer’s interpretation of the relationship between the figures. This piece specifically draws from a far too common story: generation loss. In relationship to data, “generation loss” refers to the diminishing of quality between copies of transcriptions of data. If something causes reduced quality in one subsequent copy, all reproductions thereafter will suffer continual loss of clarity and information. Applying this to human relationships, I investigated how generation loss occurs through the vehicle of assimilation, neglect, exploitation, theft, and other human endeavors—the failings or suppression of one generation to preserve resources, customs, histories, cultures, languages, and knowledge in general for the subsequent generation. This concept of data injury over time returns to the method of design detailed above, where crisp, large photo files where reduced through many stages and filters to the state in which they exist now.

Three Layers printed in reduction woodblock and one layer print with linoleum. Printed with oil-based relief inks on Unryu.