Untitled Moments:
Contemplate, Animate, Generate, Participate

contemplate

The Untitled Moments prints are a contemporary take on the aesthetic of Matisse’s Cut-Outs. Drawing inspiration from his exuberantly composed areas of flat colour, I turned to my personal archive of cellphone photos to create abstractions from the untitled moments that make up our days. Each photograph’s positive and negative shapes are inverted, with the subject matter cut out and removed. However, these subjects remain present, brought to life by the periphery of flat colour that frames their absence.

Each print is constructed of layered cut-outs, jostling in space to create dynamic compositions. Glimpsed through one another, the layers overlap and combine to generate new forms and colours. Recognizable elements reveal themselves from public and private imagery - landscapes, people, places and objects, plucked from the diverse realms of travel, work, leisure, domestic life, celebratory and everyday occasions. Each composition also incorporates a cut-out news image, a fleeting view of a world event often brought to our attention via cellphone. By exploring my trove of phone imagery as source material, I examine these ubiquitous devices as interface between the individual and their surroundings. The layering of recorded moments culminates in a journal of lived experience.

animate

The short video Untitled Moments 1-3 playfully animates the creative process that culminated in a print series inspired by Matisse’s Cut-Outs of flat coloured shapes. Light-hearted in approach, the animations document the road to that elusive artistic goal: the ‘magical’ moment when our reflections on life around us transform and coalesce into a work of art that can forge a shared connection with others. Along the journey from source photographs to completed artworks, the compositions assemble and reassemble themselves, capturing the acts of observing, capturing, sorting, choosing, abstracting, constructing, experimenting, modifying, and finally, resolving.

generate

While the Untitled Moments prints are fixed compositions, coded works offer the ephemerality of fleeting arrangements that are never the same twice, intended to be enjoyed in the immediate present only. Momentary is a generative, self-perpetuating artwork that continually layers changing coloured shapes of differing degrees of transparency, creating new colours and forms when seen through one another.

Incorporating the visual vocabulary of the Untitled Moments prints, the morphing layers begin as flat shapes abstracted from reality. Recognizable silhouettes from the world around us appear within the random juxtapositions of imagery: natural, urban, public, domestic, mundane, unexpected, comical. The formations of stacking layers occasionally pause, before renewing themselves again with different colours, shapes and sizes. These moments of pause within random action echo our current situation: even during these times of uncertainty and lack of control, we can stop to appreciate a brief manifestation of beauty.

Momentary, 2020.

participate

Present Continuous is an interactive and generative artwork that is enlivened by your collaboration. You can participate on your computer, phone, or tablet by using your cursor or finger to dynamically interact with the generated, colourful shapes. Explore your effect on the evolving composition when you move your cursor or finger around in the canvas and also when you click or tap.

Present Continuous, 2020.