Eyal Gever, SUBLIME MOMENTS
June - July 2012
In my art work, I try to create sublime moments. The moment that fills a person with amazement, awe, terror, astonishment, and silence, translates in my work to moments of pure beauty. Through a thorough investigation of the moment and the environmental situation that demarcates the boundary between an event and its representation I create sculptures that are based on a software I've developed that allows you to see the world through the eye of a high-speed 3D simulated camera. It provides us the ability to see something we normally cannot see, the moment of suspension in time. I provide a way for us to see this action as tangible frozen in time objects. It is an in-between state, a state where rest and motion can exist together.
I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my persuasions come through in my work. I create sculptures which interpret the destructive impact of the present time we live in on us and our environment. Influenced by environmental phenomena that are both socially troubling and aesthetically sublime.
I'm an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world.
The restructuring of social and political systems produces a growing sense of unease. Constant stream of bad news, war reports, and devastating images of terror, accidents and violent assault. The decay of our urban environment. Nature catastrophes, with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes. These every day events are my source of creation, they fascinate me, and my constant reminder of the fragility and beauty of human-life. Beauty can come from the strangest of places, in the most horrific events. It is my understanding of Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime, which stems from the Greek rhetorician, Longinus, and undergoes philosophical critique by Immanuel Kant. It is my way of transporting this beauty to art.
My art is a form of sublimation --- transforming my unwanted impulses into something less harmful - in my case -- stress, fear, the need to create and innovate, the need to communicate. It's not a creative process and it's not about inspiration -- it's about research, rules, process and going from one step to the other and creating problems and the obsessive need to solve problem.
In my art, I contemplate collisions of opposites, fear and attraction, seduction and betrayal, from the most tender brutalities to the most devastating sensitivities. I oscillate between these opposites, and to a greater or lesser extent my work is always informed by that.
The process that I had been developing include the development of my own proprietary 3D physical simulation technologies. In research I strive to develop fundamental computational models for physical simulation, computer animation, and geometric modeling. I draw on ideas from 3D graphics, applied mathematics, computer science, and engineering.
As my artistic practice is an exploration of the relationship between technology and art and my goal is to capture and freeze the pinnacle moment in catastrophic situations that I create and simulate and by suspending and physically fabricating these moment into sculptures I hope to arouse a catharsis experience (emotional cleansing).
My ongoing body of works examines the relationship between the simulated events that I create and their physical manifestation.
Objects of a dense and innovative process, my works seem both real and unreal. I investigate the moment and the environmental situation that demarcates the boundary between an event and its representation.
In my work you see the world through the eye of a high-speed 3D simulated camera. This way of seeing provides for us something that we normally cannot see, this moment of suspension in time. I provide a way for us to see this action as tangible frozen in time objects. it is an in-between state, a state where rest and motion can exist together.
Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. I develop my own proprietary simulations because I find that simulations has become its own sensibility. Simulation takes me further into my representations. I no longer need to keep the world in my "mind's eye". I build it, step into it, manipulate it and experience the impact in real time.
Each simulation that I create is both animated as well as few frames are fabricated and materialized into physical sculptures, built layer by layer using a type of 3-dimensional printing technology by Objet, using ultra-thin-layer, high-resolution 3-dimensional printing systems and materials utilize polymer jetting technology, to print ultra-thin 16-micron layers and achieve extreme accurate, smooth, and highly detailed 3D sculptures.
Physically these works exist in three states. The first is the 3D simulation of the event presented as video. The second one is the sculptural pieces of a particular moment I choose during the event, which after they are 3D printed by digital fabrication techniques, they are painted using traditionally automotive methods to achieve a high gloss industrial finish. The third incarnation of the work is a series of multilayer glass prints made using a glass digital printer system.
