Altered Perspectives, 2019
Collaborative Exhibition: Brandon S. Gellis and Billy Harris
Each frame, sequence, interaction and image found in Altered Perspectives is a window into our witnessing and perception of the natural world – its origin, its story, and its future – creating a blur across time, person and place. Altered Perspectives is a collaborative exhibition that re-envisions natural landscapes and fantastical realms through digital photography, video and sound design, creative coding, interactive sculptures, and augmented and mixed reality. Individually, we have interpreted the human experience as it relates to, influences and occurs in the natural world. We have identified intersecting themes in our creative work relating to time, person and place.
Brandon S. Gellis:
As an artist, I try to draw distinctions between my art and personal feelings I have about the use, sustainability, or manipulation of the natural world. The use of digital technology to continually re-map perspectives of the natural world and species ultimately forces me to developing deep-rooted emotional connections the natural world I live in. My work in Altered Perspectives – using coded-image manipulations, augmented-video footage, and interactive sculptural work – explores how people impact the natural world and conversely how the natural world informs and allows humans to grow as individuals and communities. My work presents a slow progression of how we, as people, become complacent or oblivious to the unnatural and accelerated degradation of the landscape, as it is a resource at our disposal. With each attempt to augment moment, I visualize further degradation of our natural world, without recognition of previous augmentation, leaving viewers unaware of the landscape’s origin, and unable to distinguish between ephemeral and permanent impacts.
Billy Harris:
My work in Altered Perspectives displays a perspective of landscapes through the physicality of a living person’s interpretation of death. The concept and recognition of life are inextricably linked to physical presence, and the experience of mortality augments that perspective within an individual. Nostalgia and isolation within the environments presented represent an altering in the way mourning individuals present themselves and interpret their physical surroundings. My layered photography and videography meld visual components and aspects of his presented dichotomies and play at the boundary of reality and its digital counterpart. The elements of abstract creative coding use code to display abstraction and disruption in communication and nature. Through interactive-3D experiences, I am presenting explorable interpretations of miscommunication and mourning, and their reflection of surrounding landscapes. As part of this collaboration my work has taken form as video, 3D-mixed reality video, and photo manipulation of digital imagery.
