Exhibition: "Emergence" Los Angeles Center for Digital Art

The photographs in this exhibition "Emergence" at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art are an extension of Gary Justis’s explorations in kinetic sculpture and light research that have been ongoing for the last 37 years. The complex material-based design processes in the sculptural research involves machines that move and find mechanical expression in real time by employing photography, video processes, and projected light/images. His focus ultimately realigned to the realization that the phenomenon of light and other artifacts from his sculpture could be utilized to create another source of visual expression in the captured still image and video. The photographs expand Justis’s visual language and in turn build upon photography’s historical progression. His photographs explore both abstraction and visual metaphor. The starting point lies in analog procedures (involving LED, incandescent, refracted and reflected light) while finding strategies of capturing images that suggest simulated life forms, objects and structures. His goal is to locate and record these ethereal images/entities that teeter on the edge of what we (the viewer) would find knowable. The images form a conciliatory relationship between themselves and the viewer; between abstraction and recognizable imagery. An unexplored world of Justis’s creation is opened, one that contains objects and life forms that critique their own spiritual veracity or ephemerality, perched on an edge between substance and formlessness.