what's not here is nowhere

 

Removing (or seeming to remove) the properties of gravity and weight, "what’s not here is nowhere" is the second part of the ongoing project "what’s here is everywhere, what’s not here is nowhere." I want to install a world which, experientially, most closely replicates levitation. I've been concerned with disrupting the pro-forma assumptions of normal perception; with opening a rift in our seeing through which unexpected associations occur. These new works are multi–media imaginary landscapes created using digital images, paper, ink, collaged topographical models, projection and animation.

All the digital images come from the re-configuration of one digital file, the same file used to produce the first part of the series. "what's here is everywhere." Layers of the Photoshop document are re-ordered, stretched, enlarged or reduced, and lifted from their "ground." Printed on canvas or watercolor paper in scroll format, then cut and mounted.
I paint, collage, build and otherwise alter the original images. Because of the shifting scales of the images there is no up or down. These kinds of visual tricks have been played differently throughout the history of art. The atmosphere in traditional Chinese landscape painting begins to articulate this "depthless depth" as powerfully as the 21st century imaging of virtual space. Scrolls, for example, have no center of gravity. Like digital documents, they are viewed solely by scanning. Animators put images into an alpha channel layer which detaches them from the ground and allows them to float. The goal is to create/construct an embodied experience of movement that is difficult to define, but like the syntax of Stein, is complex and rife with multiplicities.