Melinda Gibson: Unseen

Dismembered photographs by luminaries such as Cindy Sherman, Corinne Day and Juergen Teller feature in rising photo-artist Melinda Gibson’s new series of visual remixes. Sourcing her material from curator Charlotte Cotton’s book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Gibson cut up and rearranged images from some of photography's greatest figures into multilayered compositions to explore the circulation and canonization of iconic images. “When working with such profound imagery, cutting into them isn’t any easy task,” admits Gibson, who has been commissioned by Yohji Yamamoto to create a series remixing its entire archive for the 40th anniversary of Y's. “But what you gain is a greater understanding of how these images were composed and why they have become so prominent.” In collaboration with design studio Kummer & Herrman, Gibson has turned the project into a conceptual book project. Uniquely, the series of collages and their accompanying text have been printed as stickers, which Gibson then fixes into the book by hand. Each of the editions takes the artist around three hours to complete, and is numbered with the exact time and date of completion. The first edition of Amsterdam’s much-anticipated Unseen Photo Fair will play host to a performance-led launch of the new book with Gibson laying bare the painstaking process by constructing one live.