Stuart Snoddy

Anxiety about the past. (Remembering what my hands feel like.)

2012-01-11T17:25:00.000-05:00

"Shoal" 2011
Click image to play Gif.

Two Blues

2012-01-05T10:18:00.001-05:00

Click each image to play GIF.

From: "Untitled" Gif Animation Series

Light reflection on slightly wet suface.

2011-12-25T11:15:00.001-05:00

It started with a hypothesis and a sketch. The idea was to capture reflected light following my feet. I strapped a piece of cord to my tripod and to the light post to keep myself centered. I proceeded to move around the light in a circumference as wide as the string dictated. The opportunity for composition presented itself as the sphere(light) fell over painted demarcation lines. I used a b camera to simultaneously capture a second point of view where the light was static.

I love this. Light reflects of a specular surface at the same angle it is projected on to it. At different points of view the light will appear to be in a different place on a surface.

This is my timid affirmation of a singular existence. You and I, we cannot occupy the same space (at the same time) therefore each reflection will be unique. But this is marvelous because you can tell me about how you see it. And we can talk, and laugh, and maybe get to know each other a little better.

23 Irregular positions circling a light post (excerpt)

Because we touched.

2011-12-22T09:18:00.001-05:00

Click each image to play Gif.

From "because we touched" series.

By my own hand

2011-12-19T06:57:00.001-05:00

You've all been there. Just admit it.

Grape Stem

2011-06-23T16:40:00.002-04:00

...to the nourishment of my body.

Span

2011-06-06T01:28:00.003-04:00

Also,

A new game.

2011-05-15T03:19:00.003-04:00

In every situation there is a chance for spontaneity. Chess can only take you so far. This time the board was the same but the pieces were different. The pieces were fashioned from bone, stone, and other bits of detritus found nearby. Location is everything. The game, while not dictating a clear winner or being entirely focused, was a space structured by malleability and concession.

I know, I know.

2011-04-22T03:30:00.004-04:00

Pollyann and optimism.

2011-03-24T06:30:00.014-04:00

2009
Lithograph
5inx4in

Optimism is just denial. Every day I come closer to actually believing this. If, as Zizek states, particular things only appear as the balance of the void (universe) is upset, then "progress" comes at a price and satisfaction is fleeting.

Peter Singer writes about David Benatar's book "Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence.":

"Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone."

Pollyannaism is an unconscious bias towards the positive.

I like this. Ultimately, there is only failure but I rejoice at the comforting notion of:
"It'll be alright. You'll see."

Screencaps from new video.

2010-12-20T04:43:00.013-05:00

All images 1920x1080.

Look Upward

2010-10-28T07:10:00.014-04:00

Airplanes make marks in the sky while I watch daytime slo-mo falling stars.

P.S. What did you see today?

Picnics

2010-05-21T05:30:00.037-04:00

Dimensions: 1920x1080p
Runtime: 04:10

A chance for morning rain prompted us to seek parlous shelter and forced us to sit closer together. We found a spot to make our stand.

The warmth of midday reminded us that we had never fully appreciated the capacitive quality of city pavement. An alley became our beach and the cement became our sand. Warm feelings surged throughout.

By nightfall we were pros. The hum of a streetlight became the voice of infinity. We lit two candles in observance and waited patiently.

We find places that aren't typically considered destinations and make them a place for leisure. Leisure can be radical if taken out of context. Anything can. In some situations the very act of standing can be illicit.
We search for the great Unspace and hope to make it habitable, if only for a while.

Simultaneous Perspectives

2010-01-19T15:22:00.008-05:00

Looped Animation
1280x720

Specular Reflections can appear at different places on a surface depending on the perspective of the viewer. As a child I used to wonder about this. We were looking at the same grocery store floor but it appeared different depending on how we looked at it.

Nightmares and such.

2010-01-04T04:00:00.007-05:00

Animation loop, 1280x720 (original: 1920x1080)

Version 2, Chemtrails

2009-12-25T09:43:00.010-05:00

Animation, 1280x720(original 1920x1080)
Approx. 32 seconds

Is apophenia a such a bad thing?

Sky Drawing

2009-12-20T16:40:00.004-05:00

Unfinished project, 1280X720
2D elements in 3D space
Running time varies.

Mom

2009-10-05T22:40:00.000-04:00

My mother passed away yesterday.
She was a good woman.
She will be missed.

Dad

2009-09-10T12:20:00.002-04:00

My father passed away yesterday.
He was a good man.
He will be missed.

Sometimes nostalgia makes me want to puke.

2009-07-09T17:38:00.016-04:00

Animation loop, 1280x720.

Life cycle of a jet created cloud.

2009-05-04T19:31:00.013-04:00

Animation, run time: Aprox. 2 minutes 50 seconds, 1280x720

We are so accustomed to the traditional narrative arch, its payoff and its visual contrast that the real world seems less poignant by comparison. What's the point? When is the payoff? Do clouds have to tell a story? Will they anyway?

FIN

2009-02-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

My goal is simple. I want to achieve clarity through effortlessness and transparency. This is paradoxical, I know, but I feel it imperative that I strive to blur the distinction between effortlessness and effort itself. My prior efforts to affect change were based on the presumption that I was not affecting change, which was of course false. Inaction is action. My practice will involve meditation, sleep, impromptu interjections, random declarations and indifference. Before now, I did paintings under the pretense that they merited some special distinction above the normal declaration of art. Now I do whatever I want. To put it simply, I declare anything I want to be art and it becomes so. My art is visualized through simple gestures such as breathing, hopping or blinking with much emphasis on the singular tentative nature of existence. Sometimes this is recorded for posterity and sometimes it is not. I’ve found that in my attempt to achieve this clarity, focusing on the moment at hand has become invaluable. There is no stability; everything is always moving/changing including time itself. Here is not here and now is not now. Everything is new. Perhaps my goal to reach some sort of clarity is an ill-fated one because perhaps there is no such thing as clarity, but realize, the very declaration of my will to find clarity is a sign of my complicity towards this inevitable failure. So wish me luck! I’m sure my contradictions will be many and my logic will be cyclical in nature, but that’s the way it goes. That’s my journey.

Freedom

2009-01-22T23:10:00.000-05:00

Transparency through effortlessness.

Simple Imposition

2009-01-15T22:12:00.004-05:00

I'm on the verge of embarking on an epic journey to reach a state of effortlessness. It will take much effort. The irony is not lost on me. I will start by breathing, or perhaps smiling.

Jump man!

2008-12-08T12:45:00.014-05:00

I will forever be ready to play. Just come here and click start.
If technology can be be a placebo for human contact then I too aim to please. I've embedded myself in this website much in the way that I hope I've embedded myself in your memory.

P.S. I've made up my mind. It's impossible to do nothing. Inaction is action.

Today's here is not tomorrow's here.

2008-08-16T00:17:00.027-04:00

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our own existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence.

Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory [19]

White wall.

2008-07-02T17:45:00.010-04:00

See the whole set here.
The custom of "purging" color from society can be found everywhere. David Batchelor writes magnificently about it in his book Chromophobia. There is no place where this is more prevalent than on the cement of city walls. This is where a very literal attempt to subdue the "vulgar" and reinstate "purity" takes place. And it's very much a collaboration.

Works from the Unusual Animals space

2008-03-08T19:42:00.015-05:00

Disappearing/Reappearing Shadow, Oscillating light trajectory.
Same old bag of tricks.
Back and Forth

I tried not to deny impulsiveness and selfishness. I instead articulated a desire for spontaneity rather than posterity.

Month 2: Progress...

2008-03-08T19:35:00.009-05:00

See the full set here.

Play catch with the me!!

2008-03-06T13:34:00.002-05:00

Come play with me at the Harrison Center for the Arts

Q&A with Michael Kaufmann

2008-02-26T14:08:00.002-05:00

Read my interview on the Asthmatic Kitty Records Page.

Residual Self Image/ Image Retention

2008-01-29T18:30:00.002-05:00

I store my self digitally on USB thumb drives and three dimensions become two. Portability is a necessity not a luxury. I remind myself to hold on to this moment; make it last. I become a representation of myself. I become my own avatar.

Foiled Again!

2008-01-29T18:24:00.005-05:00

It’s a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren’t ready to go; that we weren’t smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us. p.18
Steven Hall
The Raw Shark Text

Shots from my project at the Unusual Animals Space.
And visual spontaneity continued:

Apology.

2007-11-10T02:23:00.000-05:00

A self portrait.

2007-11-08T15:16:00.002-05:00

A reminder to myself of how beautifully intimate or disgustingly akward making things can be.

You, Me and the Space Between: Spanning Un Space.

2007-10-30T21:19:00.002-04:00

In a flash and with a click you framed me between parallels.
Thank you Jenny.

Kinetic Echo: Phase II (Edit 2)

2007-10-24T17:46:00.007-04:00

"The crinkle of the foil and the movement inward (toward the passerby) implied a literal connection between people and architecture. It physically illustrated figure/ground relation"

The invisible forces passing complacently to and fro become visible.

Motion Detector Prototype

2007-09-30T00:46:00.003-04:00

Impermanent Painting

2007-09-30T00:34:00.005-04:00

After the paint dries, I can only attempt to keep it from constricting, cracking, breaking etc. After I adhere my circles to the wall, it's only a matter of time before they fall. Permanence is a delicate dream, and a mere whisper of its name is enough to send it crashing.

Circular Reasoning

2007-09-26T12:48:00.001-04:00

My excuse to play.

Inverted Telescopics

2007-09-26T12:30:00.001-04:00

Pictures taken through a telescope.

Stargazing inward

2007-09-26T11:59:00.002-04:00

Kaleidoscopictures

2007-09-08T01:15:00.004-04:00

The view from a narrow cylindrical telescope can be quite panoramic.

WATCH ME WEAR MY ART;LOOK DOWNWARD!

2007-08-22T17:05:00.000-04:00

Individually designed, copiously produced--my shoes are my creation. Exploration of creative possibility or individuation through homogeneity?

Ineffable Gesticulation!

2007-08-01T21:50:00.006-04:00

(Please excuse, misspellings, grammatical errors, and overall pretentiousness.)

Painting thesis transcript:

Dear Painting,

I am searching for the correct salutations, but I am at a loss. So I will just say hello, and that should suffice for now. As you know, I am no wordsmith. I will try and be brief, and with the use of the most primary of colors, hopefully I will be somewhat coherent.

I write to you in regards to the status of our relationship. Several things have changed in the last few years, and I feel that this is a good time to try and evaluate what exactly is happening and has happened between you and I. With each year we grow further apart and I am forced to approach you in different manner. I am required to reorganize and alter my thoughts about you regularly, to keep our lines of communication open. You constantly change. And this is to be expected. As long as I have known you this has been the case. But as I grow older my ability to change seems to be dwindling, and I’m often hard-pressed to keep up with you. And because of this, you often seem very unfamiliar to me. I just can’t quite figure you out. But, if I have learned anything about you it’s this: you’re consistently inconsistent.
It is very easy for me to speak retroactively about the beginning of our relationship, though I don’t think I could have spoken much about it at the time. It seems so long ago that we met. I was young and you were different. You seemed to be occupied with the melodramatic. I was interested in the same. We both shared common interest in simple familiar forms. An apple, for instance, could charm us for the duration of a whole afternoon. In these things, we discovered a common ground. We found a cure for each others indifference. The recognizable became our way of communication, and the melodramatic became our dialect.
The things we made together were quick and uninspired. They were built on a foundation of brown, a kind of brown that dries up, cracks, and eventually crumbles. I’m not saying that our expertise in the cultivation of mud was unhealthy. It wasn’t. It was very necessary for us to understand the importance of brown. Brown was the soil, and it was part of the earth. Like us, it was a splendidly dull. This identification with nature was paramount during the formative years of our partnership. We sifted through the empirical brown searching for “truth.” “Certainly, a giver of life would share its secrets”, we thought. During this time fact came in a variety of brown tones and shades. In fact, most of the old paintings we looked at had a peculiar brown patina that made them so (in)credible. These paintings were unquestionably the truth and brown was the filter we viewed them through. And it was in our brown pictures, that we also discovered the immediacy of painting. The swift transition between perceived nature and artifice, made it almost impossible to discern a difference between the two. And we found love in these gestures made from shades of earth. Truly, things were good. We had developed a relationship that was firmly rooted in our perception of the natural, and because of this, everything blossomed.
We were botanist. Equipped with the knowledge of brown and a savvy of form, we grew many paintings, out of the nutrient rich pigment. The portrait, the figure, and a bit of white pigment became our new recipe for construction but unfortunately not for duration. In our haste, we neglected anticipate the death of our creations. We were so consumed with creating these things, that their inevitable demise shocked us. These things, that were once beautiful, withered and died. They lost their luster and became unimportant to us. They were no longer special. They were now ugly. This was not the romantic death that we so often fantasized about. This death was a cold stale white, like the complexion of a corpse or the interior of a doctor’s office. It left us with nothing but the knowledge that we couldn’t grow and sustain anything. Out of the whiteness we had indeed grown sterility.
…Then along came chroma. Chroma was freedom from the whiteness. It was a freedom from death. It was purity. Color was no contaminant. White was!
I will try and refrain from talking too much about color. Not because I think that color was(is) something dangerous, but because I really know very little about it. It did indeed stimulate our relationship though. It exposed us to a vibrant world, where skies were cerulean blue and the sun was cadmium yellow. Color was the new filter through which we viewed the world. [To be clear, I am not referring to color as some kind of drug. It wasn’t. Though its Effect may have seemed comparable at the time and there was indeed a lot of “mixing” and “experimentation” going on, I remain certain that it was a different kind of intellectual stimulant.] It was not a quick fix however.
You see, color did provide an immediate gratification. But the sensation was short lived, because I didn’t understand it. Still don’t. Color was too complex. It was too intellectual for us. At least it was for me. I think that the use of color requires a unique type of intelligence. Only someone who understands the properties of paint has the ability to understand how it can produce light. For unsophisticated minds like me, it was magic. I was a caveman with a lighter, and just like him I had no idea how to use it. But you certainly did.

You know, the more I get to know you the more sophisticated I understand you to be. And I’m not sure if you noticed but I really do not “function” well around sophisticated intellectuals such as yourself. To quote Alvie Singer in Annie Hall:
“That’s one thing about intellectuals: They’ve proved that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”
Or maybe I’m just bitter because I have no idea what’s going on most of the time. It’s not because I didn’t have a go at it. I tried to be intellectual (it didn’t work). I hung out with the art kids (they hated me). I read a few books (I missed the point). I tried making things that we could hang our concerns on (it didn’t work). But, my greatest failure was loosing touch with you, and I can’t help but to think back to that old movie. I think about Alvie and Annie and their failed relationship. I think about how much Alvie loved Annie, and think about her indifference towards him. It seems some relationships just won’t work, no matter how much we want them to. So why do we try? Why do I try? Well, I keep coming back to Alvie and his anecdote:
“This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, “Why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s, now how I feel about relationships. They’re totally irrational, crazy and absurd. But I guess we keep going through it because…most of us need the eggs.”
Maybe you’ll never love me, and maybe I’ll never really know you. But I have found significance in the trying.
Stuart

Conceptual Prosthesis

2007-08-01T20:52:00.000-04:00

Painting is(can be) an action. It is not(always) an object. Filled with liquid clarity a brush squeezed upon a surface has the potential to heal and certainly inform. But is there enough left over for us to discuss? Do we dare translate into language the outward bodily movement or the expression?

preserving nature/natural mimesis

2007-07-16T14:02:00.000-04:00

aluminum foil/hand pulled glass fiber optics

Reflections on the lake

2007-07-09T21:24:00.001-04:00

Reflective surface, light and air.

Reflections on the lake

2007-07-09T21:23:00.001-04:00

Oxbow and Me: a Celebration Collaboration

2007-07-06T03:33:00.000-04:00

The Stars, the Night, brisk morning bike rides, and the light on the lake; A new (temporary life) gives birth to "temporary" constructions.

BFA Thesis Exhibition:Art Stars and Such

2007-07-06T02:24:00.000-04:00

Pseudo (art)celebrities and the like, are pinned to the walls of my studio. They inspire me. They are my idols. Now I pin them to the walls of the gallery. Collaborative effort? Celebrity Obsession.

2007-07-06T00:59:00.002-04:00

This is my studio at Oxbow.

Lake Michigan: My fertile point of inspiration. Saugatuck: This is were I will call home for the next few months. It's beautiful here, the air is crisp and the sky is blue.

Stuart Snoddy: Hello

2007-07-06T00:07:00.001-04:00

I never thought I would have a blog but here it is. My intent is simple: To keep notes and document my current projects and ideas.