Appropriation

"The action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission."

The act of appropriation in art has always intrigued me—the way artists can engage in dialogue with existing work, recontextualizing and transforming images to create entirely new meanings. This concept of visual conversation across time and artistic voices became the foundation for an experimental exploration that would later influence my aircraft collage work and expand my understanding of authorship and creativity.

My technical process centered on digital manipulation using Photoshop, taking existing artworks from various artists and reimagining them through my own creative lens. Rather than simple reproduction, I treated each source image as raw material for transformation—altering compositions, adjusting color palettes, layering elements, and introducing new visual relationships that shifted the original context and meaning. Each piece became a hybrid: part homage, part critique, and part independent creation.

What fascinated me most was how this practice revealed the fluidity of artistic ownership and interpretation. By working with diverse artists' styles and subjects, I discovered how much my own perspective, technical choices, and creative decisions could fundamentally alter an image's impact and message. The resulting works existed in an interesting liminal space—clearly informed by their sources yet distinctly my own renditions.

This exploration, developed during my studies at Arizona State University, proved foundational for later projects, particularly my aeronautics work, which similarly engaged with appropriated commercial airline imagery and archives. The practice taught me to see existing visual material not as fixed or sacred, but as starting points for new conversations—a philosophy that continues to inform how I approach image-making and conceptual development across all my photographic work.