Artwork copyright Paul Berger. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Themoon, 1989

Paul Berger
(American, born 1948)

Location: Silver Ridge Elementary, Silverdale

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Artist Paul Berger creates inkjet prints that record and manipulate imagery from broadcast television. Themoon depicts a weather forecaster gesturing in front of a graphic of earth, obscured by crescent shapes. This piece investigates how composition and recontextualization change the meaning of everyday images.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Central Kitsap School District.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Paul Berger is a pioneer in exploring the artistic possibilities of digital imagery. He combines and manipulates imagery from a huge variety of sources to investigate the meaning of images and how we dissect them. Berger notes, "I am not so much interested in the single, isolated photo image as I am in the way that images group themselves together in ways that provide us with context and meaning. I am interested in responding to common image groupings such as the printed page, the television screen, the computer printout." He first included a computer in the making of his art in the early 1980s.

Berger served as professor of art at the University of Washington for thirty-five years, co-founding the photography program in 1978. He earned a Bachelor of Arts (1970) from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts (1973) from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.