Phillip David Stearns

Phillip David Stearns @ Transfer Gallery, Nov 15 – Dec 13

13 November 2014

Transfer Gallery will be putting on a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Phillip David Stearns, titled EVIDENT MATERIAL and running from November 15 to December 13.

Stearns’s exhibition takes an usual turn in terms of material, with a series of film-based images derived without a camera. With the help of various household chemicals and 15,000 volts of alternating current applied directly to the film, Stearns has created abstracted images showing arcs that swell across the surface, created by burning holes and igniting the film.

EVIDENT MATERIAL pushes further in what has become Stearns’s method of “challenging the ontology of post-digital photography using extended techniques—bending, cracking and breaking the medium”, as the press release for the exhibition states.

Alongside the press release is a short statement by the artist and his intent:

The sentiment that the camera is an extension of the eye is taken to an extreme. When looking through the Fujifilm FP-100c instant color film datasheets, the similarities between the layering of materials in the film and the layering of cells in the retinal is striking. Perhaps it is because the development of such film technologies parallels an evolving understanding of how the eye sees.

See the exhibition page for details. **

HVIM

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