In Contender Roger Boulay's Stacks series, the photographer explores the intersection between photography and sculpture, creating and documenting hovering, suspended towers (at 60"x40") of newspapers and magazines.
Taken literally, some of the images in the series could represent the collapse of the print medium, a topic much discussed between 2009 and 2010, when these images were taken. But there's much more to the series.
Sag, 2010 by Roger Boulay
In his artist statement, Boulay explains:
In the series Stacks, I create five-feet-tall photographs of piles of newspapers and magazines that hover impossibly in space, frozen in a tenuous moment right before collapse. I give voice to the growing piles of detritus to allow viewers to consider how quickly "news" becomes old, and how consuming is ultimately unwieldy.
My work expresses some of the shifts of identity within our constantly changing and morphing culture. The sculptures topple and sway, erase and crumble, to articulate this vision of a totem that could stand unassisted. The layers of newspapers within these images—stories within stories we consume and discard—create a timeline of constructed identity, a spectrum of experience we express through our publications and press. Pockets of color create glimpses of advertising and images that draw the viewer in to the image to examine details of recombined text. Pinks and blues and greens make visual breaks in the slabs of gray paper. The larger forms of these structures create corporeal figures out of the residue and remains of our trash. They hang isolated in black, ghosts composed from the ephemeral, disposable media we purchase and throw away. Seen in a group, the stacks become figurative, signifying individuals with lives that are hard-won, bent and struggling to stand up.
Whiteout, 2010 by Roger Boulay
Roger Boulay was born in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He grew up in Norfolk, a more distant suburb in southeastern Massachusetts. He attended Amherst College, where he majored in Fine Arts and French. Boulay taught art at the Noble and Greenough school in Dedham, MA. In 2008, he moved to Albuquerque to earn his MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico. He also holds an MA in Dutch Art History from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He currently teaches photography at the University of Kentucky.
Fracture, 2010 by Roger Boulay