Written and offset printed for work Blackwork.
Dark Side of a Pixel Moon
The tightly packed layers of black card stock could, from a distance, be mistaken for sample swatches, or perhaps acoustical tiling. Upon approach, however, the deep impressions in them become apparent, and in turn they make a deep impression. There are angular indents, and sharp holes, and conical excavations. These are quizzical things, enticing geometries that seem at once iconic and whimsical. The impressions suggest some form of impact introduced them to the thick paper. The step-like quality of the indents imply the ravages of motion, arcade asteroids hitting the dark side of a pixel moon.
The various cavities were, it turns out, cut by a laser. The sheets of card stock were sliced one at a time, and then stacked to reveal the shapes-not the other way around, despite what the eye perceives. Then again, the paths were first traced in CAD software-sketched, then refined, then turned into instructions for the laser-cutter. In effect, the hypothetical space, though not the card stock itself, was stamped by a kind of virtual die.
A vacuum inside darkness, a void inside a shadow-each piece embodies a double negative. The emptiness of pure black space is given shape when something is cut from it. This double inversion fuels the viewer’s sense of disorientation. The artist acknowledges the disorientation by suggesting the works have no specified top, bottom, or sides-that they can be displayed on a wall in any alignment, or flat on a horizontal surface for that matter. However they are displayed, their sense of scale goes in and out, undulating like the naked speaker cones whose tar-paper material they resemble-as well as that of a field camera’s crinkling bellows. They veer in the mind’s retina from macro to micro, from architectural to textural, from lunar landing to Petri dish, and then back again, and again.
Regardless of scale, these laser-cut steps, these playful a-bit Bezier curves, invite the eye to travel along, to walk amid geologic artifacts in imaginary landscapes.
