Artist Statement:

"The New Religion” is my newest body of work that examines the new practices of human civilizations ,(especially with conjunction to the technology advances in the past twenty years and the broad internet usage,) as well as the new esthetics in the photography media, using the new technology, and my personal artistic progress,moving from analog to digital practices, using the photoshop and other applications, and attributing internet images in my work.

The title is “The New Religion” is coming from my experience while visiting a Museum in upstate NY and encountering a marble statue of a (supposedly) Native American woman looking at a Cross that she’s holding. It looked as a modern day pose of a “selfie” ( a term that I used to dismiss,since I attributed to it a quick and  shallow practice for a self portrait… but recently I got used to it), so I added the iPhone to the photograph that I took of the statue, alluding to the notion that the new religion is the new technology.

From that moment of departure I became free to incorporate in my work collage practices , different photoshop filters, free association with images that I took…blurring the line between representation and abstraction, and adapting the notion that very often the point of departure and the consequence of the effort is seemingly unrelated.

My work allows itself to be influenced by the Internet-wrought phenomenon of collective authorship and the effacement of the distinction between the real and the fake. 

It, somehow, manages to treat current visual culture with nostalgia , emblematic of the Net age's constantly-updating. 

Another new practice of mine is to present my work as a strip of images, showing the progress of my printing process, or the progress of my subconscious mind, as in the work titled “Apples and monkey” which embraces the adobe software practice with imagery connected with the human evolution (the Darwin theory) as well as the biblical story about the apple of Eden, the forbidden fruit that was responsible for the acquisition of “knowledge".

"Water and Ice" Archival Inkjet print 24 x 110'' © Rafael Fuchs