Oliver Wasow was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1960. He currently teaches digital imaging and photo critique at Bard College, The School of Visual Arts, and SVA. Wasow specializes in digitally manipulating his photography to create eerily beautiful landscapes that blur the line between the real and the fantastic, as seen in the piece below.
Wasow tends to blend a multitude of images within one piece and plays with perspective and continuity. His work blends very different ideas seamlessly, confusing the observer's eye, as seen in the pice above, where he represents night/day, nature/man, and even sea/freshwater juxtapositions within a single image with no clear lines separating them. Much of his work is very busy, with no single aspect standing out for the observer to focus on. This causes the observer to look all over the piece for a motif, breaking what appears to be a realistic photograph at first glance to break down into all of its impossible components.
Juxtaposition seems to be one of Wasow's main goals, and he does it effectively. The picture directly below seems to focus on the earth, comparing the above and the below, with the earth itself centered and in the foreground. Above you see activity, displayed by the flying birds and the bent and broken trees; below, stillness, evidenced by the still pool of water and the enduring stalactites. The two states are joined together by the earth, with no clear line of separation. It is an interesting, thought-provoking duality.
I enjoy the deceptiveness of Wasow's work very much, and one of the few critiques I have is that the blending could be even more seamless than it already is. Some of the transitions between images seem a little clunky and it is clear that they were put together by a computer. Of course, most of Wasow's art was made in the 90's, when photo-manipulation was just starting, so it may have been a limitation of the technology. Another critique is aimed towards the amount of activity he places in each image. This can be seen especially in the top image- there are simply too many elements going on to focus on the picture as a whole. While some of this may be intentional, it also makes some of the clunky transitions more obvious. The picture directly above does a better job of balancing all of its elements.
