ABOUT AUSTIN SETTLE
Born in California, in 1980, Austin Settle studied Art History at the University of California, and graduated Santa Barbara with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After completing his senior year abroad at the University of Nottingham, England, he embarked on a sojourn which would lead him throughout Europe on a journey of artistic self-discovery.
After a few years developing his artistic voice while traveling throughout Europe and the Americas, he came to reside in Vienna, Austria where he immediately began showing his photographic work. During this time he became enamored with analog photography, specifically the use of in-camera multi-exposures. Soon, however, Settle became restless and wanted to apply his hand to the photographic material itself. He began a series of pieces in which found material (color slides) became his canvas, and his direct on-film manipulations began. The evolution of Settle’s work led to an idiosyncratic pictorial language that is instantly identifiable.
Nostalgia and a vivid connection with the past permeates Settle’s work. Settle is a treasure hunter: his treasures, discarded pieces of family histories, forgotten vacations of long-deceased elders, smiles reflected back into an anonymous, unknown camera (and the subject behind it) are echos from the past which captivate his attention. Settle thus becomes a curator of a forgotten past.
Settle uses the term “expanded photography” (see François Laruelle) to capture the meta-nature of his process. He propose a visual paradigm shift in the reception, perception, and indexation of photography as an art form. Because light is intrinsic to the nature of analog photographic practice, Settle’s unique form of “photography in an expanded field” (to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss) defies easy analysis through conventional critical means. His images—with their jagged edges and smooth, glacial surfaces—resemble nonrepresentational paintings. Their surfaces are sculpted with a pallet knife to evoke prisms, wave forms, ice fields, rock formations and stratigraphic layers, both vertically and horizontally banded. What a surprise then to discover that Settle’s work are actually photographs, color transparencies in which the layers of emulsion have been sculpted and striated using various cutting tools. They reveal the material’s inherent properties as well as, in some cases, glimpses of the color spectrum.
Settle doesn’t situate himself in relation to the World via subjective surveying or capturing. Instead, he abstracts himself from it: the artist as processor, using the World as a support for the body’s role as a unified vision-force. In this sense, Settle cannot escape his stance/vision/camera/motif because he is the immanent cause of his own vision. He is grounded in a unique way of seeing, a painterly force of auto-poetic vision caught in the act of his thinking; which, in turn, becomes our way of thinking as we too also discover the process of being ‘in-photo.’