I, Andrew Koscheski, am an artist working primarily in the photographic arts. Many who know me would say that they broke the mold when they made me. I was primarily interested in drawing when I was younger rather than school. When I went into the arts as an adult, I had not made any art for almost a decade. When I originally picked up a camera and started shooting, I was excited I could make realistic images with it. Eventually I experimented more with depth of field, alternative process, and experimental optics/aesthetics. I always want my work to have a unique quality to it that made it stand out, like me. I had even rebelled against traditional aesthetics to try to realize my goals of becoming the greatest or at the very least most unique photographer of the 21st century, in the post postmodern era.

I wanted to make more designs rather than discovering them through my lens, so I experimented with collage. I finally came to the realization that realism, and thus my mind, was an obstacle to what I wanted to make. When I was young, work was based more on imaginative work, and I needed a way to get closer to this. As we grow older, we slowly move away from this imaginative realm and become a slave to realism. I came up with a system that would allow me to make works nobody had thought of before because I wasn’t even going to know what they were going to look like when I started. I used an RNG online to pick out numbers that correspond to an image in my master digital archive. I then college them together and use my experience as an artist to decide how to blend them together. The nature of life is random and chaotic, and so is my work. Any number of factors could have influenced what canvases I was given to work with. If I had not taken that inconsequential shutter misfire, then the body of work would have been entirely different. In this digital age, we do not have agency over many things in our lives, and algorithms that run unseen behind the curtain can greatly influence our lives. Going into surrealism is not a place I ever imagined as a photographic artist I would go, but many of the images have surreal qualities to them because they are a mashup of differing genres and color schemes. Some wouldn't even call this photography anymore because it straddles a fine line between lens-based and digital art. Some photographers would even say that surrealism is a pathway to many abilities that most consider to be…unnatural.