H SPENCER YOUNG

NEW YORK CITY

WORK • ABOUT • CV • EXHIBITIONS • FILM • NEWS • WRITING • PRESS • NFT • CONTACT

Foundations, 2014
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
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
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

Turboparalysis, 2014, is part of an ongoing investigation into lens-based media functioning in non-depictive, automatistic states. A single roll of 120 film captures the azure sky over Lower Manhattan—shot, rewound, and re-exposed to inscribe gestural marks onto each frame. The resulting images are scanned and subjected to iterative transformations—doubling, tripling, rotating, and inverting—until a latticework diamond composition materializes. This structure, balanced precariously on one of its corners, is then transferred to 8×10 film and printed by hand as a unique Ilfochrome, suspended between analog and digital realms. No two prints are identical.

Geomorphology, 2014/2020
Chromogenic print (FujiFlex) mounted to Dibond (composed in-camera from multiple painted surfaces; no digital post-production)
50 × 70 in (127 × 177.8 cm)

Geomorphology, 2014/2020, presents a bird’s-eye view of a digitally mediated world, where the real and the virtual become increasingly difficult to separate. This new landscape is realized as a fantastical, topographical photocollage that ultimately resides as a photograph. Gestures are first made with oil and acrylic paint on wood panels. Through iterative photographic processes and chance, the composition emerges. The camera sensor and chip intervene as new agents of gesture, imprinting their inherent characteristics onto the image. Although photography traditionally offers a flat, smooth surface lacking the facture of painting, here, through experimentation and time, layers of paint and photography merge into a newly imagined terrain.

velocityofnature, 2009/2012/2016
Handmade Ilfochrome print (from original photographic collage transferred to 8×10 film)
47 × 72 in (119.4 × 182.9 cm)
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

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.