Niet voor Kinderen (3)

In both concept and method, Jay Heikes’s Niet Voor Kinderen series puts a surrealist twist on figurative images composed of found objects. He made the images using the Surrealists’ camera-less photographic technique called a “photogram.” Objects found in the studio are placed on a photosensitive surface and the light is switched on briefly producing eerie silhouettes, partly focused and partly not. The images are broken down into sections—essentially heads, torsos, and legs (or sometimes fishtails)—which can be recombined. They recall the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, in which participants collaborate to draw a figure on a sheet of paper folded so that each cannot see what the others have drawn until the image is complete. The images resemble humans, animals, or Frankenstein monsters. They are not unlike the familiar forms of x-rayed mummies. The reference to mummies was intended by the artist. He printed the images using asphaltum in place of ordinary ink. Ancient Egyptians used asphaltum in the preparation of mummies. Moreover, from the 16th to 20th centuries artists used “mummy brown, ” a pigment made from ground up mummies. Continuing work on his images after printing and assembly, Heikes freely painted them with a wash that resembles this macabre substance.