Collages and Photography
Ingram is a student of modernist architecture and part of his exploration includes manipulating photographs of structures he admires in an effort to better understand them. Beginning with plates from a book or sometimes black and white photos he has taken himself, he adds blocks of color creating "Photo-collages," whose juxtapositions hark back to the early geometric compositions of El Lisitsky and László Moholy-Nagy. But unlike the primary colors embraced by these artists, Ingram’s palette references the institutional colors of the period: cerulean blues, vibrant oranges, battle ship grays, deep ochers, and the institutional aqua green of his father's 1957 Chevy. These patches of color help to high light the important aspects of the work. For example, adding blue to the photo of Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch accentuates how the monument frames the sky, or boarding up the windows of I M Pei's addition to the Des Moines Art Center in ochre reveals the architect’s name hidden in the framework of the building.