COREY GRAYHORSE

ArtificialMemories

Color and wonderment is a consistent thread throughout my work. A wide-ranging influence of styles in art, photography, and fashion combined with traditional, and pop culture influence my perspective. Through the lens, I create strange beauty and satire, eliciting emotional and social responses. Frozen in time through photography, the work becomes a window into a fantastic dream world, with hints of my reality, to draw an audience into my world.

I find myself inspired largely by my daughter, who serves as a constant muse in my art, and reminds me that everyday is an opportunity to offer a fresh viewpoint into my work. She appears in my images, as well as other close friends and relatives, to support an advancement of my personal circle.

The sets and locations are installations and a platform for performance art, constructed and carefully orchestrated solely by myself. The addition of characters, similarly, adds spontaneous collaboration to my images. In the end, my portraits result in a unique form of human expression. 

ShortStories

These photographs are taken simultaneously with my other photographic projects and have thus evolved into a single, separate series.  These pictures give me the inspiration and the motivation for the others.

I’ve always found street life, neighborhoods and communities so stimulating; and, the man-kind interaction just as wonderful.  Man created an environment that has become our playground, and he/she performs within it.  Paying attention to the detail, with respect to our surroundings, permits us this type of participation.

I attempt to photograph and  record, as well as to discuss and preserve. Learning about our past instructs us about our actions in the future.

SurrealSouvenir

A desire to capture creative composition led me to immerse my images with color and flavor of my diverse and eccentric imagination in an attempt to leave the viewer with a memory, essentially, a ‘surreal souvenir’. 

This process involves a sort of treasure hunt of interesting backdrops:  the creation of elaborate sets paired with the art of costume design.  The main elements are designed and carefully placed as part of the story creating strange beauty and satire, allto elicit emotional and social responses.  The images contrast the traditional with the contemporary.  It is clear that I have as much fun making them as I propose the spectator to have viewing them.

Stop and Smell the Roses

I’m home. Or am I?

Years later and not much is as I remembered it.  My childhood memories had literally faded and were being bulldozed before my eyes. 

Do we no longer find beauty in the past?  Is bigger always better? 

Gentrification and contemporary change drive out and ultimately extinct the distinctive characters nostalgic structures that make these cultural pockets desirable in the first place. 

I created this documentary project as a visual time capsule.  This series of images allows me to hold on to what I find familiar, before it is no longer there.  It is a kitschy exploration of lowbrow culture, which celebrates a unique community with fast vanishing cityscapes, and reminds the viewer to Stop and Smell the Roses.