H SPENCER YOUNG

Solastalgia, 2017

Photograph
Chromogenic print
Edition: 5 + AP + Studio proof
First edition
Sizes variable
Signed on verso

“Abattoir is pleased to present a group exhibit of artists who look at landscape, both rural and urban, through a personal lens, to reach an inner landscape, likened to an element of self- portraiture; “the weather inside”. Zeroing in on a particular segment of the visible world or by inventing a place based on memory, artists attain a mode indicative of “the weather inside” as first expressed by artist Lori Ellison (1958- 2015), when she proposed a show titled “The Weather Inside”, about the spiritual and psychological correspondence of landscape to the soul of the artist.”

Artist statement

Geometrodynamics #1 and #2, 2019, and Imaginary Time, #1, 2013 are part of an ongoing exploration of the unseen shapes, structures and boundaries of our world, both in time and space, via a series of formal challenges pertaining to photography itself and what defines its own boundaries.

The compositions comprising Geometrodynamics #1 and #2 were created using the camera only, employing an array of experimental techniques which themselves test the boundaries of what is and is not traditionally considered photography, insofar as photography is, in its purest form, perfectly indexical.

While the compositions are created with the camera only, some exposure adjustments are made to these images in post-production, akin to what might be done in a traditional darkroom when printing black and white or color images.

These two works, an attempt to envision unseen cosmological physical structures around us, are named after controversial theories which attempt to break down all forces of the universe into strictly geometrical terms.

Imaginary Time #1, 2013 is part of a series of “time and location shifted” works which comprise images taken at different times and places (different U.S. states in this instance), in one work.

The trees, from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in landscape orientation, were captured, and, at a later date, combined in-situ, using the camera only, with multiple interfering images of the Empire State Building, in portrait orientation.

The technology allowing the aforementioned time shifting, while relatively new in the history of photography, has now been available for nearly 15 years. It is the idea of one image containing a span of time amongst multiple collaged images that connects with the title, Imaginary Time, a physics function utilized in experiments which require a broader theoretical concept of time, one in which everything happens at the same time, versus our traditional understanding of time as a straight line with a beginning, and possibly an end.