Ed Spence

Biography
1981 -

About the artist

The art of Ed Spence attempts to create a visual language capable of describing abstract, physical and spiritual concepts. There are borrowed elements, such as the grid, that suggest mathematical concepts and the mapping of space. The plinth sets a stage for presentation and provides a physical frame that references the museum context, and in turn, it represents the passage of time. By extension, the presentation of objects within a museum context brings attention to the history of humanity in relation to real and hypothetical technological advances. Photography is used both for documentary recording and practical aesthetic purposes. In this way, Spence can capture the phenomenological effects of light and literally dissect the results. The process can be seen as a combination of photography and collage, in which the resulting digital planes are at once superimposed and embedded. The process of reorganization draws attention to the plasticity of virtual space.

One aspect of Spence’s art is fuelled by his interest in the newly integrated digital environment. Like an intangible projection, it exists in holographic non-space, but also exists in an inescapably physical way. The hypothetically infinite dimensions of cyberspace are extended and restricted by the hardware it is governed by. With this in mind, his art attempts to chart the fringe of digital aesthetic and the unfathomable scale of nano tech.

These works are driven primarily by process. What initially appears to be a digital effect is actually a meticulously handcrafted deconstruction of an image. Using only a knife, ruler and scissors, portions of the images have been dissected into tiny squares and the information is presented in alternative configurations. No pieces have been lost or gained.
Light plays a large role in the work of Spence. The analysis of how objects appear gives inspiration to his process and the particulate nature of these cut and paste abstractions suggests the underlying structures that give shape and individual characteristics to matter. Each individual pixel records the path of light, resulting in a document that contains the mapping of an ephemeral instance. By restructuring that instant, the artist can overcome the reality of its inception while keeping the information as a whole. The superimposition of alternative formations allows the concrete objecthood to come into question. The formal boundaries of subject and background are undermined through transformative manipulation and the illusion of pictorial space is brought into light.
Upon realizing the reorganizational logic, a playful visual interplay of dissolution and reassembly is open to the viewer. The building blocks of the visual language become transparent, allowing the relationships of hue, saturation and lightness to come to the forefront. Many of these pieces are, by the nature of the material process in conjunction with the figurative subject matter, meditations on individuality in the face of physical and spiritual universality. Caught in the moment of disintegration, the work depicts the dissolution of individual states into a duplicate coalescent form. The subjects are reborn into alternative existences, simultaneously alien to, and at one with their environment, a space which they have always already been part of.

Spence’s work is about many things. There are references to the rapidly increasing digital environment that has become very present in our contemporary world. There is a focus on materiality and how it paradoxically exists and dissipates within the form of its own representation. Next to that, there is also an analytical perspective that is fuelled by the artist’s curiosity: his interest in science and the physics of light and perception. Last but not least is the spiritual element that is expressed through the depiction of physical and metaphysical transformation.

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