GERRY JOE WEISE

ART COLLAGE

Born in Australia, GERRY JOE WEISE has traveled the World, and has experimented with his many ideas and concepts on Contemporary Art. He left Australia in 1980 at the age of 20, and moved to Europe where he was attracted to the several different European Art movements. He first settled down in Germany (Frankfurt and Munich), later moving to France (living in a Occitane hameau in Southern France) and Switzerland (living high up at 2,000 meters altitude in the Alps). Gerry Joe Weise then returned to Australia in 1999, apart from living in different Australian capitals, he spent some time on two remote aboriginal communities of the Kunwinjku tribe, east of Kakadu Reserve Park in Arnhem Land, at the Monmoyi remote settlement and the Gunbalanya community.
Gerry Joe Weise has utilized many different mediums in his career, from painting using canvas, wood, bark, metal, stone and slate; to installations comprising of "colored pigments on earth", water, plants, totems, wood and stone; to performances and musical "sound-scapes"; to photography, negative engraving, digital photographic manipulation and photographic collages.

DIGITAL COLLAGES
The Artist's Statement
26 April 2006 by Gerry Joe Weise

The Digital Collages from the "New-Realities" theme use a variety of techniques from "old-school" montage superimposing to "new-school" computer manipulation of the final image. Landscapes can be looked at from a 2 dimensional to a 3 dimensional view. The "New-Realities" theme is trying to obtain a 4th dimensional aspect, the "inner-soul" of the landscape. Some of the works can be looked at by tipping the image around to its side or by standing-it-up upside down. Other works can be looked at from a topographical view, as if the viewer was airborne. I have always respected collage artwork from Modern Art to Contemporary Art, and while creating these works has been a natural on-going process of great passion and desire, it seems I can finally express myself about nature as a whole. One must note that animals and humans do not appear within these landscapes : earth, water, air and vegetation, overwhelm any chance of an animal form making an appearance, and humans seem to be the intruders. Air has a way of being represented in different densities, different colors : yes air has color and form. Minerals give earth different flavors and odors, water creates division and distance, while vegetation creates time and space. It is impossible to escape nature walled up in a city, and do we have to drown out earthly sounds with our mechanics ? Utopia is for amateurs, the sublime is for the unfit, and to hell with political realism on this planet !