REWRITE REALITY exhibition artist | Syl Arena
My Constructed Voids step into the spaces of my in-between. I gaze upon these photographs and wonder if their metaphor represents spaces inside of me or if the metaphor points to my presence inside of a larger multiverse.
These Voids merge mystery with spectacle in a manner that queries expectations of the contemporary photograph. I position them as ethereal landscapes — sublime, yet otherworldly — and embrace the idea that their visual ambiguity invites interpretation. To that end, their titles (Parna, Quin, Amsu, Jern) are fabricated words intended to strip away narrative connotation and encourage meditative consideration.
Many mistakenly see these photographs as computer-generated. Certainly, they appear to contain non-photographic qualities — deeply saturated colors, shifting figure-ground relationships, shadows that randomly change hue, and zigzags that suggest glitches in digital code. Such misconceptions speak volumes about the desire to see truth within photographs.
Their visual truth echoes the spirit of many Bauhaus photographers in that these images originate as tabletop constructs of paper, plastic, glass, and metal; the glossy materiality of which provides form and reflection A trio of stage fixtures deconstructs light into projections of primary colors. Where two hues merge to create a third, shifts in perceived depth occur when the interference of the paper’s edge casts a shadow that reveals just one of the parent colors and, in the more recent works, when the substrate absorbs the light, transports it internally, and radiates it elsewhere.
In these Constructed Voids, I do not strive to make photographs of scenes before the lens. Revealing the specificity of assembled materials is not of interest. Rather, I strive to create photographs of scenes that I cannot see. Specifically, I distort the two ends of my 4x5 view camera, with the lens looking in one direction and the film plane looking in another, my photographs portray scenes that exist beyond the horizon of human vision.
Syl Arena is a California-based artist/educator known for his use of energetic color and his explorations of non-representational photography. In a manner that echoes the work of Bauhaus artists, Arena admits an obsession with the interaction of surface, color, and shadow. Looking beyond the world of abstraction, Arena positions his photographs as visions of new realities rather than an extraction of the scene before the lens and, thus, refers to them as “non-mimetic.”
Arena is also greatly interested in commenting on the loss of the photograph’s position as image-object in our screen-based world. He exhibits his Constructed Void series as unframed, large-scale prints (38”w x 54”h) that arc directly from the walls of the gallery. To add to the physicality of the work, under the movement of gallery ventilation or the breath of a curious viewer, the prints undulate gently and, if one walks past the prints quickly, they emit a rumble.
Arena’s photography has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally. Among the most noteworthy are: ‘2016 Aperture Summer Open: Photography Is Magic’ at the Aperture Foundation in New York, ‘Contemporary Photography 2018’ at the CICA Museum in Korea, and ‘Visions of Cuba’ at Fototeca de Cuba in Havana.
