SUSPENDED ANIMATION #4 – PRAYER FOR PARADISE’S PREY
2022
photographic print, acrylic, collage, ink, resin, wire – 7" x 7" x 3.5"
About SUSPENDED ANIMATION #4 – PRAYER FOR PARADISE’S PREY:
Although all artworks I create hold a special place in my heart, Prayer for Paradise's Prey will be extremely difficult to part with, so dearly do I cherish the memory around this work’s creation and meaning. captures the melancholy sensation of time’s passage as seasons change, and the natural order of life’s cycle turn vibrant life into wilting death—with promises of return for the patient. I took the photograph from which this piece’s collage draws (a single bird of paradise) by the side of a Los Angeles freeway, where the changing of seasons seems incomprehensible and invisible, save the minute signs of dying plants so often overlooked as we speed past life on the unforgiving concrete highways. Where vibrant colors and hopeful life threaten to fall away – often without our notice, Suspended Animation #4 instead presents the viewer with an escape into memory: stretching the fading colors of overlooked beauty amidst harsh concrete landscapes into the kaleidoscopic infinite of what will—inevitably, if eventually—return.
About the series:
Our ability to assess distance or proximity relies on depth perception, the capacity to view objects in three dimensions. In everyday, our very lives depend on this overlooked element of human vision; failure to assess and absorb different perspectives renders even the most mundane activities, like a highway commute to work, dangerously lethal. Each iteration of Suspended Animation focuses on an encounter in everyday life, capturing in freeze-frame otherwise seemingly insignificant moments in time to enable an appreciation for the small details, the little things, the beauty of overlooked miracles that too often blend into our surroundings.
Some pieces in Suspended Animation feature a singular photograph as the work’s central element, using transparent media like glass, acrylic, or resin to magnify and illuminate the moment in question—giving viewers the chance to look again, this time, from new perspectives. Others use the momentary act of viewing as a meditative experiment. Here, I retain the series’ approach to transparency and media forms and extend the experience by supplementing collage techniques to enable sustained consideration of everyday life’s unrealized possibilities—a dazzling kaleidoscope of infinite variations. Time constitutes the central conceptual element behind the series Suspended Animation, inviting the viewer to a shared moment of experiential pleasure and contemplation, and reminds us to stop and see differently. This work is difficult to classify, constituting both sculpture and mixed media, while simultaneously resisting any attempt at easy categorization.
Some pieces in Suspended Animation feature a singular photograph as the work’s central element, using transparent media like glass, acrylic, or resin to magnify and illuminate the moment in question—giving viewers the chance to look again, this time, from new perspectives. Others use the momentary act of viewing as a meditative experiment. Here, I retain the series’ approach to transparency and media forms and extend the experience by supplementing collage techniques to enable sustained consideration of everyday life’s unrealized possibilities—a dazzling kaleidoscope of infinite variations. Time constitutes the central conceptual element behind the series Suspended Animation, inviting the viewer to a shared moment of experiential pleasure and contemplation, and reminds us to stop and see differently. This work is difficult to classify, constituting both sculpture and mixed media, while simultaneously resisting any attempt at easy categorization.