H SPENCER YOUNG

NEW YORK CITY

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Montage, 2021
Triptych, ultraviolet ink on cast Plexiglas with custom stainless-steel hardware
Each panel: 28 × 18.6 × 1.5 in (71.1 × 42.2 × 3.8 cm)
Total weight 105 lb (35 lb per panel)

Installation view above left and center: Art Basel | Miami, Untitled Art, Miami, FL 2022

Montage, 2021, explores the accelerating dematerialization and entropy of images and image-making. In an expanded approach to mark-making, the forms are generated through physical movements of red, green, and blue light sources—around an exposed digital camera sensor—from varied spatial positions and distances.

The resulting magenta and blue fragments are not digitally composed but arise through optical interaction. Each form is a self-reflexive shadow contour: the internal and external structure of the camera body casting itself back onto the sensor. Red, green, and blue were chosen for their role as the additive primaries of light.

The object dimensions correspond to standard digital photographs, rotated vertically to emphasize their physicality. This reorientation encourages the viewer to perceive them as objects rather than images. Their thickness was selected to heighten each site’s perceptual interaction, and the gap between object and wall directly affects the saturation via affecting the opacity of the object.

The work is tangentially inspired by the Double Slit Experiment—the foundational quantum physics trial that revealed light’s dual nature as both particle and wave. That paradox of image and event is echoed here: the pieces function simultaneously as traces and phenomena.

Finally, the work reflects a multi-generational legacyin real estate and construction. Reoriented horizontally and stacked, the forms resemble bricks; vertically aligned, they become windows. Mounted edge to edge, they form a wall. Their meaning shifts with physical arrangement, just as their formation emerged from the spatial choreography of light and body.

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)

“Severe Clear” is an aviation term used to describe flying conditions so clear as to be nearly 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 skyscape 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

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.