Thousands of Dots on Photographs (20 pieces)

Just how do you make your past memories come alive? How do you experience them with a fresh, new set of eyes? Well, if you're artist Sebastiaan Bremer you take out your old photographs and carefully draws on top of them. Dotting the surface with contrasting ink, New York City based Dutch artist Bremer breaks his photos free of the frame and gives them new life. His signature process involves applying thousands of tiny ink dots, which often times blend into each other to create beautiful webs. These dots, or webs, are where a new story emerges, filling in where the photo left off.

Look closely and you'll sometimes find ghostly figures. Bremer not only likes to create "an image of the world anew through the process of adding" but also likes to use historial references and unconventional images in his work.

Bomb Magazine has a great interview with Bremer. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"Well, a photograph is a flat thing. By drawing and layering things on top of it you get the sense of looking through it. Especially when you look at a picture that has many details. You as a viewer spend much more time with it. Images change every time you see them. So it’s a different relationship with time again; you’re adding, making the experience more alive. Our days are colored in very strong ways by every little thing that happens to us.

"You are colored by so much all the time―the things you’ve seen before, the things you’re going to do later. It’s very hard to be in the absolute now. I just want to communicate a sense of the experience of memory and the present."

Bremer often times uses his own personal photographs. He describes his father (as seen with his brother) in the first picture, above. "My father looked so young and optimistic. The look in his eyes is full of wonder; I couldn’t keep myself from creating the illusion that he had long hippie hair. He looks supremely high. So, in this case, there was just joy, no guilt involved in completely altering reality. He is actually a pretty straight man; he missed out on the ’70s counterculture, so I gave him a taste of that."