SUSPENDED ANIMATION #13 – EXPANSION
2022
photographic print, collage, ink, acrylic, resin, paper – 12” x 12” x 1”
About SUSPENDED ANIMATION #13 – EXPANSION
Expansion uses 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. Suspended Animation #13 captures the melancholy sensation of time’s passage as autumn turns to winter. I took the photograph from which this piece’s collage draws (the remains of green leaves against masses of yellow and gold against a gray sky) in a small village located in rural upstate New York, where the changing of seasons disproportionately vivid, all-encompassing, inescapable, and often overwhelming. Where green leaves threaten to fall away, Suspended Animation #13 instead presents the viewer with an escape in memory: stretching the fading colors of a fall landscape 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.