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)

“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.

velocityofnature, 2009/2012/2016
Handmade Ilfochrome print (from original photographic collage transferred to 8×10 film)
47 × 72 in (119.4 × 182.9 cm

A burst of bougainvillea, layered through time, becomes a still from the cosmos. Composed from images taken at the home of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and refined across seven years, velocityofnature envisions the Earth as in motion—hurtling through space. Like dipping a microscope slide into the river of time, the work captures not stillness, but a moment suspended at high speed. The final Ilfochrome print fuses natural beauty, perceptual velocity, and material precision into a single chromatic surface. The print was exposed by hand from an 8 x 10 transparency. No two prints are identical.

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.