various sizes | machined cast acrylic sheet, ultra-chrome print | 2008
I wonder if it’s possible to crystalize a rainbow.
My installations had become increasingly immersive — the atmosphere had swollen beyond the typical white light and shadowing I’d used in the past. The space now seethed with color and movement. I wanted to capture that fleeting moment, tamp down the light, make it into a physical object.
Gleaming Without Us uses a new type of material that seems to actually capture light. This medium can optically contain the atmosphere created within the Dewdrop installations. Combining cast acrylic with color digitally output from the HD projections, a special substrate is produced from which my drawings are machine-cut.
The title and drawn images stem from Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, where the author creates a thought experiment describing a world after the human race hypothetically vanishes. The thrust of the book illustrates nature’s power to quickly proliferate into the niche left behind. The idea of nature, completely unhindered, is the starting point for this body of work — the drawings compact vignettes of a possible future hybrid landscape.
Although I begin each piece as a unique cutout knife-drawing on paper, the finished work is a product of a multistep process: photographed, digitized, bit-mapped, digitally manipulated, vectored, splined, then routed from the composite material. Each step adds a unique, synthetic signature. Every interpolation creates a new generation — lines get tweaked, corners softened, shapes lost, errors cropping up. After several generations, the object is a transmutation from the original — something hand-cut and organic morphing into something machine-rendered and synthetic. Most of this work has been placed in the Microsoft Collection.