Untitled(Time)

Kiel Fletcher Artist statement

Over the past decade, my work has shifted from object-centered investigations toward immersive, time-based, and perceptually driven environments. As my practice has evolved, I have become increasingly invested in how images and sounds circulate socially within networked culture and how collective events are mediated and aestheticized. How these generate our collective understanding and define our lived experiences. The question of how this lived experience is shaped by fractals of reality are what fascinates me.

Informed by these life events, my work investigates perception as an active, mediated process rather than a passive reception of information. Writing software to create painterly abstractions combined with generative sound to frame the visuals mimics Heraticlus’s “river of time”. I invite the viewer to revisit the work over and again, recontextualized by everchanging audio. The work presented with this statement furthers this exploration using abstraction as a tool for reinterpretation.

Conceptually, my practice operates at the intersection of media theory and phenomenology. I approach technologies not as neutral tools but as materials that shape subjectivity, social relations, and modes of governance. Images function as flags, data becomes geography, and attention itself becomes a site of control.

The work asks not simply what is being perceived, but how perception forms under conditions of mediation, overload, and technological familiarity. My current trajectory extends these concerns into non-representational approaches to landscape and place, treating sensory data (generative sound and visuals) as a form of portraiture.

The work presented uses pieces of software coded using Processing, a visual based coding language based in Java, to execute drawings made from thousands of triangular shapes. These abstract shapes are assigned color and value is built up by repeatedly layering the shapes to create abstracted representations of landscapes. The colors in these works directly match vegetation and natural materials from an undefined location in the forests of the Cascades. The goal of this is to represent the Cascades as a portrait without making a representational portrait of the location. Conceptually, the idea is born from the idea of representation based on fractals of information we retain while recognizing the loss of information and inherent misrepresentation of our perception vs reality and the unreliable nature of memory. The work is intended to be contemplated, digested, revisited, passed by, engaged with, and refamiliarized repeatedly, similar to the stated ideals of renewal, resilience, and adaptation.

The goal is that it brings a level of familiarity while concealing and revealing elements of color and shape that beg the viewer to reexperience the work. This is emphasized using painterly elements and qualities within purely digital work. Often the work begs of the viewer to ask how it is made, or viewers simply assume that it is a painting based on its aesthetic qualities. Upon further investigation, it is apparent that it is no different than a digital photograph; however, the push/pull of understanding reinforces the conceptual properties of the work. How do we value a digital image versus a photo versus a painting and does that matter?