A collection of 12 unique GIFs exploring time, transformation, and movement in different dimensions. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I have been thinking deeply about the evolution in medium in various artists’ careers: 

Jenny Holzer moving from text on paper to LED projections and digital scrolls. Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Cindy Sherman from photography to film. Gerhard Richter from painting on canvas to printing on glass. Barbara Kruger from graphic collage to video & sound installation. Robert Rauschenberg from collage to assemblage to collaborations with dancers and composers, performance. 

While the phase transition from one medium to another represents creative growth and obvious metaphors (icicles, boiling water & steam, caterpillars & butterflies, and so on), I began thinking specifically about the act of dissolving or deconstructing and re-forming into something new.  

I also had to think about time, as a still is just that: a frozen moment that often allows the viewer to project their own fantasy movement or subjective temporality onto it. A moving image has to deal with time in a more confrontational sense. 

The medium of the GIF, more specifically the seamless loop, is somewhere in between a frozen moment and linear time. It is the eternal return, and thus relates more to the infinite: to meditation, trance and the ouroboric nature of reality, life cycles. 

Where narrative time moves forward (past → future), a loop folds time back on itself.  What results is a new kind of experience: duration without progression.  That difference—time that doesn’t lead anywhere— is why the loop relates more to a painting or dance than it does to a movie.  The loop offers radical reprieve for a world obsessed with never-ending novelty, seemingly incapable of movement without the guise of progress attached.”

PROCESS

Each of these works began as a hyper-layered collage, which I then fed into AI & prompted to produce dozens of variations of video direct from the collage source. Those outputs were brought into Premiere & After Effects to create new hybrid video files and then finally imported back into Photoshop as individual frames, retouched, and edited down to their final looping form.