Working experimentally with photography, video, and digital media, Thom Heileson explores notions of the liminal in perception: both the elusive, ever reducible threshold between states (of consciousness, structure, and causality) and the flux and transience in the external and internal worlds. His photographs and videos are aggregates built from the multiple, often using as source material architectural structures and the natural landscape in states of transition: sites of construction or demolition; sites subject to wear and tear as testament to natural activity. He sees our built environments as living systems embodying growth, aging, death, and the continuous flow of larger systems extending through life cycles. In the Ghost space photo series, images are combined and transformed, building up fictional landscapes whose scenes and textures evoke an emotional tone the way a faint trace of a memory can—or, the way an image of memory is an aggregation of multiple, mutable fragments of the past.
In conjunction with Ghost space, Thom Heileson will present Free Dissociation, a new video work created in collaboration with sound artist Wyndel Hunt. Installed alone in Gallery Two, Free Dissociation pairs Heileson’s animated visual imagery with Hunt’s similarly abstract sound composition in a moving “tapestry of memory”, where vision is synesthetically married to sound. The artists exploit perceived parallels in their work—which speak in corresponding emotive tones—to build an immersive perceptual ground delineated by intrinsically linked strata of light and sound.