ABSTRACT WEDNESDAY: ED SPENCE




Today's Abstract Wednesday is brought to you by Ed Spence. This work was exhibited as part of Winsor Gallery's Wayward Exhibition. 

Vancouver-based artist Ed Spence comments upon currentgital technologies, unsettling the surface of the image through analogue “pixelation.”Ed Spence, by contrast, painstakingly “pixelates” photographs by hand. His cuts out one section of an existing image, slices it into minute segments, rearranges these elements into complex geometric patterns, and reinserts them into the whole. Spence’s works in Wayward apply this process to images of the human body. As though in acknowledgement of humanity’s ambivalence toward the rampant spread of digitization, he scrambles the visual information of the dancer’s head and torso into an unreadable language, leaving limbs extended in space like lyrical parentheses. In They rotate slowly through space. Watch as they rotate; not yet fully rendered, a population of “pixels” have wandered away from the original picture altogether (leaving an uneasy void there), and assembled themselves in an entirely different frame. 

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