Category: Psychedelic Art

Sean describes this work:

Commissioned for a custom video wall in Chicago, this 4K animated loop is inspired by contemporary, abstract visions of landscape, and is a more refined follow-up to the video ‘Cities & The Sky’ (2014). The installation site features a high elevation and panoramic view of the surrounding city and lake, which guided me to the Japanese concept of ‘unkai’, or “sea of clouds”, to explore multiple shifting perspectives and emerging/submerging points of detail and architectural elements … as an act of meditative looking, the uncanny scale of one’s field of vision becomes temporal as well as physical.

This group of work was influenced by abstract painting in the early 20th century, a period when artists were intensely engaged in various philosophies of eastern spirituality, the occult, mysticism, transcendentalism, and sacred symbolism. The pictorial freedom of abstraction allowed artists to navigate this field of alternate cosmologies, hallucinatory landscapes and radiant geometries. The title ‘Cosmicomics’ is borrowed from Italo Calvino’s series of whimsical short stories that follow the birth & evolution of the cosmos.

Sean says:

Excerpts from a series of commissioned video works created using generative 2D/3D animation. A combination of algorithmic forms and textures, pre-rendered 3D elements and hand-drawn marks are composed, manipulated and looped, resulting in continuously evolving ‘motion paintings’ that reflect both process-oriented and gestural approaches to digital image making.

This group of work reinterprets early 20th-century abstract painting, a period when artists turned away from pictorial representation in favor of more open explorations of form, color, sound, geometric rhythm, spiritualism, and synesthesia. The title is borrowed from the painting style “synchromism”, which depicted music as a visual score of radiant shapes and symphonic color harmonies. These animations thus circle back into this history of “visual music”, as later developed in experimental cinema, video, and now, digital motion graphics. Although these movies are silent, the viewer can easily imagine the musicality suggested by the rhythm, dynamics, and textures of the visual composition.