Painted on top of a collection of anonymous vintage family photos, I was interested in using the contours of the human subjects within as shapes to pool paint and pigment overtop of.

I became intrigued with how this action rendered these bodies as being analogous to bodies of water, where issues of flow and dissolution can begin to suggest interior fluid states of being. Similar to thermal imaging, where organisms’ heat signatures are described in abstracted neon colors, these paintings give the impression of seeing a different type of invisible essence.

As a group, they function as a family album of sorts, a collection of strangers whose energies emanate forward, bleed into and interfere with one another’s. Accentuating their age and anonymous status, the overpainting depicts the inhabitants of these snapshots as apparitions, ghostly and phantasmal, and signatures of some otherworldly presence. 

Jon Verney is a visual artist whose practice interweaves the materiality of painting, photography, and film to describe notions of dissolution and flux in the physical world. Found imagery, chance-driven chemical reactions, and natural phenomena inform an approach to photography that explores the potential of its transformational, fluid qualities. Verney has exhibited his work internationally, and has been an artist-in-residence at SIM in Reykjavík, Iceland, the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Penland School of Craft, the Independent Imaging Retreat in Ontario, Canada, and spent two years in Florence, Italy working at Studio Art College International. He holds his MFA from the University of Michigan and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Painting. His studio practice is based in North Adams, Massachusetts.