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Courtesy of the Regional Arts Commission
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On Friday, October 25, the exhibit. “ORIGINS: Natural Selections,” opens at the Gallery at the Regional Arts Commission. The show is a collaborative effort between two artists, photographer Larry Emerson, and Byron Sletten, whose work is a little more difficult to describe.
Emerson and Sletten agreed to meet me for an interview before the opening of the exhibit and their Gallery Talk on November 13, and explain the philosophy—and the technology—behind this unusual show.
This interview has been edited and shortened for publication.
Larry, I know being a photographer isn’t easy. It’s so much more than pointing a camera and snapping a picture, but it is easy to understand. At least, it’s easier than figuring out exactly what you do, Bryon.
Byron Sletten: I haven’t exhibited in a long time, so this is kind of an interesting…reinvestigation for me on the fine art aspect of what I do. I have that background in my past—I was trained as a painter, traditionally—but I got interested in computers about 30 years ago at the University of Illinois. It was very early on in the process of 3D visualization. That was before Pixar or any of that stuff started happening. They had just started up a national center for supercomputing applications there, which was run by an astrophysicist named Larry Smarr. And I saw some of the things they were doing with visualization that was just incredible. I mean this was 30 years ago.
Larry Emerson: We didn’t even have cell phones then, did we?
BS: So he was doing some things with visualizing scientific data, for instance tracking storms, what happens in the eye of the hurricane, and also deep space visualization, what was going on in the galaxy. This was all very interesting to me, but I was a painter. I didn’t know any of this technical stuff, so I got up to speed on it slowly, and that changed me. It changed me from being really interested in painting to being interested in a radical way of looking at images.
Do you enjoy what you do now more than painting?
BS: I think the physicality is part of the interesting thing about this show. It still has tangible objects. It still has canvases and frames that you can look at and move around and so there is an aspect of it that is still very much like a painting, but they are created in a way that is not at all like that. You’re doing with a computer what a camera does with light. You’re taking numbers and you’re generating a replica of reality and calculating the way light bounces off surfaces, and how they refract, how they reflect. So it’s a pretty radical way of creating very realistic things that don’t exist, and never will, probably. You have the added benefit of doing all of this stuff where you just come up with an idea and provided you can build it with a computer, you can look at it from any angle, you aren’t bound by gravity, you can move it around, spin it. As you can probably imagine, from the point of view that you draw or paint something, to something like this, it’s a pretty big departure, but the end product is still kind of a painting. It’s just a different way of looking at it.
LE: But the nice thing about it, you could animate it if you wanted to, for the big screen or little screen. Once the model is created, it’s really there in this little world.
I think I saw a YouTube video where you animated some of Larry’s pictures.
BS: Well, you will soon, specifically about the show. I’m just finishing up a little 3-minute piece on it. As you can imagine, it’s very time consuming to render these frames. Ten seconds takes about 3 weeks of computer time. The payoff is very interesting because it’s a way of doing something that’s different from a traditional approach, but it’s not delivered electronically. It’s still a painting on a wall.
LE: I’m using the same materials for some of my pieces that he has, so side by side they’ll be on the same physical material. Just how we got there is totally different.
That’s another question: walking around, what am I going to see in this exhibit?
BS: It will feel like a traditional art show, but it will be, “How the hell did that get done?” You can look at my work and it could still feel like it’s photography, because it’s hyper-real, photo-real, it’s all using the science of light, the physics of light, to recreate what a lens does. We understand how light bounces off of surfaces pretty well—we as in the people who write the software, but what we can do once we understand that is we can replicate it. So certain materials have different properties, transparencies, but we can change that. We can make a human figure look like ice. One of the pieces I have is kind of a ghost of a human figure, sitting in a chair, and he’s completely made of ice.
LE: In the show, it’s going to be almost three shows in one. There’s going to be our collaborative pieces, then my pieces and his and the video. The largest piece in the show will be about 8-foot by 10-foot. So it’s my photography, but Byron took my images and reworked them using his computer and created the shapes.
BS: So this collaborative piece is what sort of inspired us to get the show off the ground. We were talking about the relationship between nature and science, which is kind of the theme that runs throughout this whole thing, really, the idea that they are interconnected. If there is a way to express that in collaboration with his vision of nature and my interest in science and technology…let’s put this together and see what we come up with. So this was the inspiration for the show, and there’s still going to be some pieces like that, that are dedicated to our collaborative effort.
What made you want to pursue your path, Larry?
LE: Ever since I was a little boy, I just enjoyed exploring and looking for things. And I just nurtured it along until I realized I was lucky with a kind of gift that I see things that other people don’t see. That’s what “The Art Around You” is (Emerson’s full time gig). I get hired to go to a location and find the art that people walk by every day.
I have no idea what I’m going to do until I see it. Every morning I wake up, make coffee, go outside and get the paper. And I see that everything has changed. You’re sitting there and the breeze comes by, and that leaf will never be the same as it was at that moment. It’s always different.
BS: Wow, that’s pretty profound.
LE: Is it? It’s different. I feel different. Do I look the same?
BS: No.
LE: [Laughing.] I got older.
BS: I got older too, just thinking about it.
So what are you trying to say with this exhibit?
BS: It’s not S.T.E.M., it’s S.T.E.A.M. If you add art to science, technology, engineering and math, what you end up with is a much more powerful set of skills and tools that we need in the world right now.
LE: I’m just trying to help people see. While Byron is out in the universe, I’m under rocks.
BS: There is a lot of science in terms of the way things are organized…each piece will have a QR code on the plaque, so you can take your phone and hold it up and download something like a Wikipedia about that piece that might go into the science of Fibonacci sequences or who this person is sitting in this chair. It’s going to be interactive. And Larry’s pieces—
LE: [Laughing.] Mine will just go, “Flower.” Maybe the Latin name.
BS: But it will also talk about your philosophy and your approach. It will be interactive, but we’re not really trying to explain anything. That would be pretentious. We’re just saying, “Hey, the world is pretty cool. Let’s look at it in a couple different ways.”
LE: Stop, wonder, think.
Is that what you want people to take away from your exhibit? A more profound view of things?
LE: Yeah, I think we both do. Just look at what you have in front of you.
BS: There’s a little bit of a hope to be inspiring…that we can bring art and science together for learning, solving problems, understanding the possibility of really being here, now.
Don’t get too philosophical on me, now.
BS: But it’s absolutely fundamentally true. It’s kind of a miracle.
LE: [Nodding.] Kind of a miracle.
The opening reception for “Origins: Natural Selection” is from 5:30-8:30 p.m. Friday, October 25 at the Regional Arts Commission, (6128 Delmar, 314-863-5811, art-stl.com). The event is free and open to the public, with free valet parking on opening night. In addition, there will be a Gallery Talk on November 13 at 5:30 at the gallery, which is also free and open to the public. Normal gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 10-5 p.m. and Saturday 12-5. The gallery is closed on Sundays.
