Debra May received her MFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her practice has incorporated work in various media, including painting, drawing, collage, and assemblage. At present, she is working with found vintage photographs, which are rephotographed and reconfigured.
Images in the series Doubles are arrived at by digitally mirroring these photos along the vertical axis, creating a novel form. The inspiration for this process of binary duplication is the inkblot, specifically the Rorschach inkblot test. The Rorschach serves as a projective exercise, inviting individuals to ascribe narrative to images that are essentially without content. The Doubles images function in a similar way; they are not forthcoming as to what they signify, but act as a screen onto which the viewer projects their own interpretations and associations.
The series of diptychs presented under the headings Flight, Theory of Mind, Abstract Reasoning, Conjunctions, As Beforetime, and Hypothesis of Memory are also made using photos of vintage photos, which are combined digitally into pairs that by their proximity take on new meaning. The diptychs are arrived at by an intuitive process of sorting, selection, rejection, and reconfiguring until the pair of images gels into something like a whole. The pairs are sometimes incongruent; at other times the images resonate in an implied narrative. Often, they carry an emotional subtext, with suggestions of violence, joy, melancholy, tenderness, or loss. In some the relationship is formal, based on internal geometries or gestures. But in each case, there is an opportunity for the viewer to arrive at their own conclusion as to content.
The Collages, dating from 2017 to present, are all analog, using vintage images and papers.