Ansen Seale: Ever Wonder
Bryan Florentin: Cryptic Title

December 13, 2014-January 10, 2015
Opening reception Saturday, December 13, 6:30-8:30 pm

Kirk Hopper Fine Art is excited to announce our next two solo exhibitions, Ansen Seale's Ever Wonder and Bryan Florentin's Cryptic Title. Both artists use photography as the base of their practices but employ non-traditional methods of both picture taking and display to communicate their ideas to the public.

Ansen Seale found his interest in nature while growing up in the Rio Grande Valley. The natural landscape, he believes, forged his visual vocabulary with its long horizontal lines, the sinuous shape of the river, and fields laid out in man-made grids. Seale is inspired by the things we, as humans, cannot see or hear along with the human ability to devise machines that can help us look past the limitations of our senses. It is from this interest that Seale's slit-scan camera was invented which he uses in some of his work, such as the Vortex series. The camera looks through a thin slit, and produces one column of pixels at a time, at a rate of about one hundred per second, building a photograph influenced by the passing of time. If something moves or changes in front of the camera, that thing will be rendered, but if nothing moves or changes, the lens captures the same pixels on repeat and will simply render stripes. The technology Seale uses along with his choice of subject allow him to explore the nature of reality and time, and man's perception of both.

For Cryptic Title, Bryan Florentin uses photographs, objects, and object-images to explore the idea of flux. In some of Florentin's new work, he photographed urban landscapes and later revisted the same sites in order to document any human interventions and naturally occurring changes. The spatial interruptions found in these landscapes come from a variety of sources and manifest in many different ways. Florentin is able to mimic this variety by printing his images on material such as paper, transparency, backlit media, and other surfaces. These multiple methods of presentation not only allow Florentin to display his work on the wall but to also pull his work into the viewer's environment.