Voids

Voids combines and blurs analogue and digital spaces—creating a still life wall relief that exists in a constant state of image generation, seemingly from nothing. Two LCD screens displaying pure white sit behind glass vessels of water on a mirrored shelf. The water acts as a lens—magnifying and manipulating the digital image to refract the ‘white’ image back to its digital colour recipe of red, blue, and green pixels. Bands of colour weave their way around the glass—evolving and warping as the viewer moves through the space. These visual wavelengths of colour expand and retract, varying based on the viewer’s position.

Voids draws visual cues and mechanisms from histories of image generation—both from early photographic experiments and still life traditions.  This works visual manipulation is akin to the water lenses used in ancient Chinese, Roman and Greek culture for magnification and scientific research into optics. The function of the water filled glass vessel also parallels the Sutton Lens or Sutton Panoramic Camera (circa. 1860) which used glass and water as a camera lens to capture wide angle imagery. While the vessels arranged on a shelf reference the tradition of still life painting, where objects are carefully composed to explore themes of perception, light, and materiality.

This wall relief sculpture refracts the white image into its visual ingredients—acting as a portal into the complexities of digital image generation to make the technology behind digital displays visible. In a meditation on the blank screen, a digital vessel that holds information, Voids deconstructs the recognised visual mechanisms of still life as they have been seen throughout art history—reconstructing these core elements into a new virtual/physical paradigm.