Raphael Zollinger

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I work across multiple media, investigating systems of representation that collapse the distinctions between image and object, expression and documentation, and art and technology. My process examines how images and objects accumulate and shed meaning over time within our screen-based culture. Through this material tension, my work bridges the everyday with the political, links history to the present, and blurs the boundaries between personal and collective memory. In Invitation to Lost Time, large-scale aluminum photographs explore how human memory fails and histories vanish. The series began with a box of family photographs from two and three generations ago. I found the domestic backdrops familiar but alienated from the anonymous relatives inside them; I physically folded the paper to hide the figures. Only eerie fragments remained—a disembodied sleeve, a shadow, or a hairline. These altered snapshots are scanned, scaled up to life-size proportions, printed directly onto aluminum, and floated in minimalist black frames to highlight their physical weight. The heavy, fractured creases violently interrupt the image, forcing the viewer's eye away from the missing subjects and toward the background details: lace tablecloths, floral drapes, and mid-century lamps. These nostalgic remnants collide with modern digital distortions, where the scanner has registered the deep folds as brilliant, electric-blue and iridescent light leaks. Moving between deep pictorial windows and...

Artwork