Absent Minded Monotonous Splendor, 2010
digital video, 2 minutes, 34 seconds, looped with audioExhibitions
Pandemic Projects, Wavelength, Signac, NJ, 2020
The Contemporary & Digital Art Fair, New York, NY, 2019
I Observe, Therefore You Exist, Riehen Atelier, Riehen, Switzerland, 2013
The Sky is Falling!, Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, 2012
Portraiture: Inside Out, Walsh Gallery, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, 2011
Where I End and You Begin # 3, Mixed Greens Gallery, New York, NY, 2010
The Contemporary & Digital Art Fair, New York, NY, 2019
I Observe, Therefore You Exist, Riehen Atelier, Riehen, Switzerland, 2013
The Sky is Falling!, Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, 2012
Portraiture: Inside Out, Walsh Gallery, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, 2011
Where I End and You Begin # 3, Mixed Greens Gallery, New York, NY, 2010
Absent Minded Monotonous Splendor is a video work that animates the erasure, dissolution, and ultimate cosmological expansion of a portrait—my own. Over time, the image breaks down: first the face vanishes, then the blemishes remain, then even those disband into a slow-motion galactic sprawl. What begins as an intimate act of self-effacement ends in something strangely universal, or at least universalized.
Borrowing its soundtrack from the History Channel’s The Universe, the work layers scientific narration over aesthetic labor—inviting a deadpan collision between cosmology and cosmetology. The low drone of the voiceover, intended to explain the origins of everything, instead amplifies the banality of image editing. In this, the video occupies a slippery middle ground: part artwork, part tutorial, part eulogy to the idea of representation.