Stephen Marc

Under the Hill
2010
Digital montage/ archival pigment inkjet print
9” x 26” (22.5” x 37.5” framed)
Image is courtesy of the artist

Ellicott City
2009
Digital montage/ archival pigment inkjet print
9” x 26” (22.5” x 37.5” framed)
Image is courtesy of the artist

Untitled
2010
Digital montage/ archival pigment inkjet print
9” x 26” (22.5” x 37.5” framed)
Image is courtesy of the artist

Emancipation Oak
2009
Digital montage/ archival pigment inkjet print
9” x 26” (22.5” x 37.5” framed)
Image is courtesy of the artist

Artist Statement

I am a photographer/digital montage artist engaged in weaving together, and bringing to life, the places and remnants of the African Diaspora, with an emphasis on United States history. My work is an interpretative relocation of, and commentary on the limited representations and accounts of the black experience, into the early years of the 20th Century, that were usually defined from outside the community. Following my Passage on the Underground Railroad project, I have continued to utilize historical landscapes and building structures which I combine with period documents, illustrated newspapers, post and trade cards, decorative and utilitarian objects, as well as pertinent modern references. Although my travel is focused on on-site documentation, increasingly the physical remnants housed in collections and acquired from diverse sources, have become the points of departure for developing the montages. This strategic representation of black presence (also impacted by gender roles) is attempted through the replacement and redirection of objects and imagery from relevant periods of time within the geographic settings that they represent and were derived from. These materials functioned as recorded history and commercialized amusement, reflecting a great deal about the conflicted attitudes of mainstream societal control, need, and desire as the colored filtration through which to (re)view blackness. This is almost a reversed metaphorical process of trying to understand subjects solely by observing the shadows that they cast. My intent is to allow the haunting of the past to symbolically resurface providing a layered contextualization of what was, encouraging viewers to see through and reconsider the past and its relationship to the present, gaining pivotal insight into the terms of difference.