Kurt Paulsen Biography
United States, born 1981
I came to still images through motion. My MFA is in Motion Media Design from SCAD, and I spent years in film production and animation before grad school pushed me sideways. It was the fine art electives, drawing especially, that gave me permission to lean into the strange things I'd always been drawn to.
The photographer Eadweard Muybridge got me thinking about time as something a camera could take apart. Then I saw Zbigniew Rybczyński's The Fourth Dimension, a 1988 slit-scan film that turned that idea into something genuinely unsettling, and I was hooked. I built my own slit-scan camera, partly out of DIY camera-nerd obsession and partly because the images it produced resonated with me immediately. Bodies stretch, compress, and fold based on when they moved through the frame. The distortions are smooth and organic, built into the exposure itself. I value the fact that these images require extensive staging and many "takes" to get right, rather than digital post-processing.
What interests me is what those distortions do to the way you look at a figure. The bodies in my work are not meant to be erotic, but rather unsettling in a banal kind of indifference. They aren't consumed the way conventional imagery presents them. They're rearranged, made malleable, treated as something earthier and stranger than what you expected to see. The slit-scan process strips away the fixed body and replaces it with something that feels just wrong enough to hold your attention differently.
Every image implies a scenario. Characters interact, react, look toward something outside the frame. I'm more interested in mystery than explanation and the story is always bigger than what I'm showing you. I'd rather leave you in that space to write the end yourself than resolve it.
I am still teaching film production and motion graphics at a state university and in the graduate program of the regional art and design college, but my real creative energies are put into my surrealist endeavors.
