GABRIEL ALLEN | Untitled_COWBOYS, 2023

The included series takes its starting point from Richard Prince’s “Cowboy” series. Gabriel Allen has curated, cut out and assembled roughly 100 figures from advertising found in various magazines from the 1980s. The series poses questions about the future of digital media and imaging in a culture increasingly saturated with advertising while inspiring conversation about the history of the analog medium using collage techniques, lighting, and meticulous still-life compositions. 

Allen brings his selected analog print imagery into a digital format and uses photo editing software to manipulate the color and scale. Allen constructs a unique cardboard structure for each cutout image so that each one may stand alone and function as a standalone, movable "actor." After that, he repositions and illuminates his cutout figures, makes new photographs of them, and prints the images at a size that exceeds the original copies, providing scale-shifts that speak to the fundamental structures of photography. Through multiple transitions between analog and digital mediums, the resulting photographs create dynamic visual relationships and compositions that read as pages from the same magazine. 

BIO

Gabriel Allen was born in Savannah, GA in 2001 and raised in San Antonio, TX. He is currently completing a BFA in graphic design from the University of Alabama, and plans on attending an MFA program in photography in Fall of 2024. His studio practice utilizes an interdisciplinary framework to examine the intersections between media overstimulation, consumerism, authorship, and illusion. He works with appropriated materials from print, broadcast, and internet media as a form of inquiry into the evolution of communication and market-driven consumption.