Show & Tell: Candy by Derek Stroup

One of the biggest advantages of working with digital output has to be its flexibility. Once an image/idea is developed as a file, it can be adapted to different formats and media so easily. It’s an obvious observation but an image can be printed 2′x 2′ for one purpose and 2″x 2″ for another. If art is about making decisions, digital print output increases the amount of choices an artist gets to make (or at least changes the order in which some of those decisions have to made, right?).

A few months ago while browsing through the shelves at Printed Matter, someone pointed out a great book to me. A simple collection of images by Derek Stroup called Candy. Stroup’s book is a good example of this potential for reformatting. His website includes a body of work called Candy- individual inkjet prints of simplified candy wrappers. They’re quite beautiful- all text is removed and the viewer is left with “clean” packages. The images serve as a bellwether for our consumer conscience. Stroup has created a game of recognition reminding us of the branding we normally ignore. Each is listed as 16″x20″.

Stroup’s book at Printed Matter collects all of these candy images into a small accordion-bound mini-portfolio. But rather than exist as reproductions of another media (like a book of offset-printed images of paintings or etchings), there is no degree of separation. The book is just a different version of his larger digital prints.