Jan Avonds

New series in progress:

“Children at Play”

My works are platinum-palladium prints of original, fanciful computer-generated scenes. They are rendered in a playful, naive style, but are often inspired by painful or difficult topics.

This series explores humanity’s relationship with its technologies, including the ways in which we are helped and hindered by our creations. While our technologies are our helpers, they also, inevitably, embody our flaws, illusions and occasionally, our neuroses. Throughout the history of mass-produced machines, and now in new ways with the rise of AI, we’ve dealt with questions about reliability, usability, and impacts on us both socially and spiritually.

This series, taking inspiration in part from Norman Rockwell and H.R. Giger, presents humanity as children, and technology is presented as machines with our more animal traits. In recognition of tech’s sometimes devious machinations, the imagery is stylized to mimic the defects and quirks found in early photographic processes.

The images are hand-printed using the 19th-century developing-out platinum-palladium photographic process, which first involves hand-brushing the light-sensitive solution onto cotton-rag paper. In a deviation from the conventional process of exposing the sensitized paper by contact-printing with a large-format negative, I instead expose the sensitized paper using a novel scanning-laser system I developed.