User:Tiffrosen/John DeFazio

John Paul DeFazio (born September 2, 1975) is a Los Angeles based mixed-media and glitch artist, experimental film-maker, and award winning director of photography in the film and television industry.

Early Life
John DeFazio was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he also received a Fine Arts and Design degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Upon graduation from Carnegie Mellon he traveled to Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California where he received a Masters of Fine Arts in Film Production before settling in Korea Town, just shy of Hollywood.

Post Pittsburgh
Since relocating to Southern California, DeFazio has served as the director of photography on numerous 35mm and high-definition movies, some of which have hit the Sundance Film Festival ("Crossing", "Roam") and the Cannes International Film Festival ("9:30"). John's second feature, "Undoing", was singled out by the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival for its "striking imagery." While DeFazio's diverse background in the visual arts offer him a unique perspective and approach to cinematography, his work, however, has been criticized for an overuse of color-drenching, over-exposure, and under-exposure.

Mixed-Media Art
Despite his professional career as a cinematographer, DeFazio is most known for his mixed-media work utilizing non-traditional materials such as organically grown rust, hair, grease, oils, fabric dyes, and decayed organic substances mixed with more traditional materials such as photographs, glass, steel, copper, concrete, plaster, and found metal objects. He has been utilizing the same materials and utilitarian methods of construction consistently since the mid 90's.

DeFazio's earliest work, between 1990 and 1998, consisted primarily of traditional black and white photography as well as sporadic experimentation with mixed-media and machinic sculpture. It was not until his relocation to Los Angeles, and into the early 2000's, that he began mixing these two mediums into cohesive, symbiotic wholes. His first notable mixed-media piece, VIVISection I (2000), consisted of a series of drastically deteriorated 3"x3" squares haphazardly cut from Penthouse Forum literature which were then further butchered and layered upon each other giving rise to newly formed text/image relationships through the juxtaposition of revealed slices of image and text within and throughout their layers. These squares were then further layered with aged tape and glue and then mounted onto 5"x5" sheets of shower curtain material and compressed between glass plates.

DeFazio's second notable piece, Kiss in a Red Storm 1-5 (2001), consisted of a series of identical photographic prints of himself in mid-kiss with a former girlfriend. These prints were then layered between deteriorated pieces of yellow, liquid absorbing paper (with poor mechanical strength characteristics) that were soaked in cooking oil and haphazardly littered with red, oil-based paint in nondescript chaotic patterns. The oil-soaked paper became translucent and when layered over the photographs with the opaque red patterns, the prints gave rise to a new image reminiscent of lovers lost in a haze or storm, unaware of their earthly surroundings.

Glitch Art
In 2007 DeFazio began experimenting with other non-traditional methods of image degradation and it was by accident that he discovered the I-frame or Intra-frame phenomena. In video compression algorithims, where motion prediction or interpolation is used, compression artifacts such as ghosting and video break-up tend to remain on decompressed frames and move with the flow of the video sequence causing a changing, double-exposed image in short bursts of compressed video. This discovery led to three pieces: Doll Face in Red Dress and Doll Face I and II, each exploiting the aesthetics of disruptions within the bitstreams of compressed MPEG video. Doll Face I and II are primarily composed of a series of heavily abstracted and unrecognizable female faces (up to forty in Doll Face I). Each face is a screen grab from a massively zoomed-in portion of a very low-resolution digital video I-frame of a Japanese porn star.

DeFazio's 2009 piece titled, Constellation, exploits datamoshing by making artistic use of the inherent artifacts, such as ringing and staircasing, that arise from JPEG compression and downsampling and upsampling. Constellation consists of a series of four 60"x84" digital prints of a woman's face. Each image was scanned at high resolution from its original source (super 8 mm film) and was then digitally degraded by repeatedly downsampling and upsampling in resolution before being heavily JPEG compressed at maximum compression. The resulting images were then enlarged further to their 60"x84" final size.

Work Philosophy
The common themes that consistently run through DeFazio's body of work are twofold: (1) the fragility of the human condition in relation to the limits of world energy and being, in particular—the fluid boundaries of love and rage and (2) the contextualization of an otherwise inconsequential existence of all life (and non-life) in all worlds (both macro and micro), through an immediate and cerebral response to organic substances and utilitarian materials. DeFazio has described his work as a mechanism for interfacing his own mind and body to the instinctive hatred and love of the here and now, and to the relentless pursuit to cope with the overwhelming distances in human feeling and pain.

"My work as a visual artist is primarily consumed by an attempt to subvert the aesthetics and procedure of beauty. It is for this reason that my interest in mixed-media and glitch art was born. The combination of diametrically opposing visuals and materials often lends itself to a reassignment, or a birth of some kind of beauty..." -John DeFazio

Notable Works
1. No-Man, 1-45 (1995)

2. Brief Romance in the Middle of Nowhere, 1-10 (1998)

3. Ether, 1-42 (1999)

4. Passing I, 1-6 (1999)

5. Passing II, 1-6 (1999)

6. VIVISection I, 1-5 (2000)

7. Kiss in a Red Storm, 1-5 (2001)

8. A Woman I Love, 1-10 (2006)

9. Two Lovers From San Francisco, 1-38 (2006)

10. Love Song, 1-5 (2006)

11. Doll Face in Red Dress, 1-2 (2007)

12. Doll Face I, 1-40 (2007)

13. Hollywood Cunt I, 1-3 (2008)

14. Hollywood Cunt II, 1-6 (2008)

15. Time Baby III, 1-2 (2009)

16. Time Baby IV, 1-2 (2009)

17. Asian Girls Blowing Kisses, 1-8 (2009)

18. Constellation, 1-4

19. Doll Face II (work in progress)

20. VIVISection II, 1-2 (work in progress)

21. VIVISection III, 1-4 (work in progress)

22. VIVISection IV, 1-4 (work in progress)