H SPENCER YOUNG

NEW YORK CITY

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Foundations, 2014
Recursive architecture.

LightJet Ilfochrome on Dibond, artist’s frame
36 × 67.5 × 4 in (91.4 × 171.5 × 10.2 cm)
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Edition fully placed

Foundations, 2014 is a doubled photocollage composed of gesturally made photographs, arranged like bricks to suggest stability and structure. By placing the camera sensor in the role of the canvas, the work explores gesture, aura, texture, facture, and the artist’s hand within photography—capturing moments where a camera and a painting are both in motion and in dialogue during the process. Each image is rich in color, light, movement, and texture, representing a confluence of mediums with a long, sometimes contentious, shared history. Printed as a Lightjet Ilfochrome—now a permanently discontinued process—this work is irreproducible in its original format.

Severe Clear, 2014/2019
Chromatic atmospheres

Chromogenic print on Dibond, maple frame, museum glass (artist’s frame)
43 × 63 × 2 in (109.2 × 160 × 5.1 cm)
Edition of 4 + 2 AP

“Severe Clear” is an aviation term used to describe flying conditions so clear as to be almost too much for the brain to process. It refers to skies so purely blue that you feel like you can see to infinity. The image is comprised of shapes meeting in such a way as to suggest a horizon. Historically there has been discussion about why gazing out at the open sea reduces anxiety. Viewing a vast horizon gives one a clear view of potential incoming threats, and time to prepare if needed. While gazing into the vast sea or sky of the image—an experience of depth on a flat plane—one may not realize that the scene was gesturally “drawn” into the camera with a beam of light. In the tradition of questioning what constitutes a photograph, and what constitutes a camera, Severe Clear is a trompe-l’oeil digital luminogram created with a single gesture of colored light onto an exposed, lensless sensor.

Turboparalysis, 2014
Lens-based automatism

Wall sculpture
Laminated handmade Ilfochrome print in welded aluminum frame (collaged from multiple 120 film exposures, transferred to 8×10 film)
51 × 51 × 2 in (129.5 × 129.5 × 5.1 cm)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Part of an ongoing inquiry into lens-based media operating in non-depictive, automatistic states, Turboparalysis traces the azure sky over Lower Manhattan onto a single roll of 120 film—shot, rewound, and re-exposed to inscribe gestural intervals onto each frame. The images are then scanned and subjected to recursive transformations: doubling, inverting, rotating, until a latticework diamond emerges, balanced delicately on its axis. Transferred to 8×10 film and hand-printed as unique Ilfochromes, these works hover between analog and digital registers. No two are identical, each sustaining a precarious architecture of chance and control.

Signal Horizon, 2012
Photograph (rephotographed digital composition, reflected and distorted through unexposed Ilfochrome paper)
Details to be determined

Signal Horizon, 2012, rephotographs a digital composition through unexposed photo paper, distorting the image into a band of color, noise, and chromatic interference. The result sits at the edge of signal and perception—a kind of visual threshold where information starts to blur and fall apart. It reflects an ongoing interest in the mechanics of image-making, and in what surfaces when structure begins to dissolve.

Solastalgia, 2017
Chromogenic print (composed entirely in-camera; no digital post-production)
Dimensions variable
Edition of 5 + 1 AP + 1 studio proof (first edition)

Solastalgia, 2017, created entirely in-camera, is part of an ongoing investigation into nature, time, transience, loss, and technology’s mediation and fragmentation of reality. In the work, the sun is represented by a vintage 1970s glass globe lamp that belonged to the artist’s paternal grandmother. The lamp, now in the artist’s studio, resided for decades in the living room of the family’s lake house—a gathering place for the extended family and a site of healing after loss The everyday object, captured as a picture-within-a-picture, transforms a beacon of absence into a luminous source of enduring light. At the same time, the role of the image itself—and its deepening significance in the mediation of human experience—looms large. Derived through the rephotography of screen-based digital imagery, Solastalgia preserves the layered artifacts of mediated vision within a singular, in-camera composition.