New Realm Images Gary Justis
The subjects of these photographs are not computer generated. I use analog procedures (involving LED, incandescent, refracted and reflected light) finding strategies of capturing images that suggest simulated life forms, objects and structures. I try to locate and record these images/entities that lie on the edge between still visual order and material displacement.
These photographs are an extension of explorations in sculpture, kinetics and light. The material-based design processes in the sculptural research naturally lead to machines that move and find mechanical expression in real time by employing photography, video processes, and projected light/images. I had the realization that light phenomena and other objects from my sculpture could be used to create another source of visual expression through photography.
This exploration gives me glimpses into a new realm where a visual medium yields images that have their origins in my own subconscious. There is a sentient quality to some of the imagery. This takes me closer to realizing the human desire to create life outside our symbolic order of things.
Metaphors of Bioluminescence in Gary Justis’s New Light Images
Buzz Spector: Opening remarks for the Exhibition, New Light Images, PH21 Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, January 14, 2021
Let me begin with a quote from a truly bizarre little book, Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, first published in English by the University of Minnesota Press in 2012:
“All incoming bits of information have, simultaneously, a tentacular, optic, and sexual dimension. [This] world is not doubtful, but surprising; vampyroteuthic thinking is an unbroken stream of Aristotelian shock.”
More about “vampyroteuthic thinking” in a moment.
The flickering strangeness in Gary Justis’s “New Light Images” arises less from their methods of making than from their surprising evocation of bioluminescence. The artist has noted that the makeshift armature he uses to make this work includes an old dentist's illuminating lamp and projector and many colored light filters and reflective foils held in place by clamps or suspended from cables. He uses both incandescent and Light Emitting Diode (LED) bulbs, and the digital camera he employs reads what’s been illuminated very well while interpreting surrounding spaces as black.
Justis’s setup, then, employs the discards of past technologies and the limitations of contemporary recording modes for what constitutes its new production. If a quality of hauntedness arises from the New Image Works, it might bear mentioning that Jacques Derrida offered us the term hauntology 25 years ago, describing how any attempt to locate origins or histories is dependent on (always) already existing language, which make "haunting the state proper to being as such." In the realms of the haunted we find such exotica as ghosts, zombies, and vampires. This last incarnation enters into the biological as well as the fantastical. Vampire bats, for example, are actual creatures as well as “familiars” associated with Dracula. More important for this introduction is the deep-sea squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, whose scientific name translates to vampire squid from Hell. Vampyroteuthys is a bioluminescent ocean inhabitant that lives several thousand feet beneath the surface. It reaches a length of barely twenty centimeters; its eyes (3 cm in diameter) are proportionately the largest of any species in the world. It has another distinction; that of being the subject of an ironical case study by the media theorist Vilém Flusser.
Flusser’s contributions to media theory rank with Walter Benjamin or Marshal McLuhan. His most important books, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 1983, and Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985, are both concerned with understanding the cultural significance of images. Flusser introduces this premise in Towards a Philosophy . . . by stating,
“Images are significant surfaces. Images signify—mainly something 'out there' in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two surface dimensions). This specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time is what is known as ‘imagination'. It is the precondition for the production and decoding of images. In other words: the ability to encode phenomena into two-dimensional symbols and to read these symbols.”
In what turned out to be his last book (he died in an automobile crash in 1971) Flusser and his co-author, the artist Louis Bec, authored a 70-page treatise on the consciousness of Vampyroteuthys, reflecting, through it, on the capability of living things to understand their own existence. Flusser and Bec describe the biology of the vampire squid on their way to addressing Heidegger’s proposition that the non-human animal cannot understand dasein, or being-in-the-world: “The animal behaves within an environment but never within a world,” as Heidegger writes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Flusser and Bec, however, point out that the vampire squid creates its world through bioluminescence: “The vampyroteuthis itself irradiates the world with its own point of view. Its bioluminescent organs engender appearances, that is, phenomena. A world such as this cannot deceive because it is a self-generated deception.” If human beings have a worldview, Flusser notes, then so does the vampire squid.
Gary Justis’s photographs of projected light are themselves recordings of a world he has created. Justis adheres to Flusser’s understanding of how images are surface signifiers. In a recent correspondence with the artist, he noted: “In the beginning, I had a very serendipitous working method, but with practice, note taking, and lots of body memory I’ve begun to learn how to repeat some effects, although with the constantly evolving lighting technologies, there is still more new territory.” It’s an appropriate choice of wording to join artistic investigation with exploring terra incognita. Justis is an artist who depicts waking dreams, different imaginative spaces, and alternative worlds. Questions of "when" as much as "where" or "whom" subtly haunt artworks of this exotic scenario or that. Through his New Image Works, Justis aspires to make sense of this world while simultaneously drawing forth specters of its often-displaced reality.