How does one convey a sense of space and materiality through digital abstraction? SLABS is a project addressing these fundamental concerns that have been guiding my visual research for more than a decade: the expression of depth, materiality, space, and scale through limited color palettes and compositions, yielding moiré patterns and other pixelated illusions. Each animation from SLABS is created using a moiré pattern technique — a unique imaging process where two images overlap to generate an optical illusion. Alongside the use of moiré, the animations are rendered with streaks of hard-edged pixels and limited color palettes. The pixelated textures and colors from SLABS are inspired by many instances of geological and natural forces: landslides, earthquakes, lava streams, ice calving, waterfalls, natural landscapes, and even imaginary places. The textures and colors are composed to divide the screen in horizontal and vertical arrangements, like slices of digital matter stacked against each other. The resulting animations appear as high-contrast, kinetic works that evoke natural features, geological formations, imaginary structures, or abstract compositions. At large, these compositions relate to many histories of abstraction in painting, op art, moving image, and computer graphics: from the optical paintings of Bridget Riley to the moiré sculptures of Jesús Rafael-Soto, from the experimental video works of the Vasulka’s to the pixelated maps of The Legend of Zelda. The artworks from SLABS were designed as digital compositions which can adjust to a variety of contexts; they can be viewed both horizontally and vertically, they can be displayed in both digital and physical spaces. Many iterations of SLABS were previously exhibited as animated wallpapers in digital and physical venues. Each artwork from SLABS also comes with a companion piece, titled DISCS. DISCS are circular compositions moving away from the rectangular format of SLABS to create a more sculptural experience, where each artwork appears like a hovering spherical object. SLABS and DISCS were released as NFT collections in June 2022 on Quantum. |