Fragments, the latest collection of digital art by Traci Ultsch now on display (into the early New Year, I believe) at Inspire Space Park / Art Planet, is a slightly unusual exhibition. Not because it is out-of-the-ordinary when placed alongside Traci’s overall portfolio – far from it; Fragments is as visually layered and abstracted as much of Traci’s other work. No, what makes it unusual – or perhaps curious might be a better term – is that it has not one, but three introductions, allowing visitors to take their pick as to which they find resonates the most.
Two of the three might be taken as reflections on life – or more particularly, how life is not something we can plan or necessarily control; at least, not beyond the most basic needs and routines. Rather, when all is said and done, it is really a fragmentary passage of time and events; actions and reactions within the greater planning which can so often become confused and oddly juxtaposed one to the next as we look back and try to recall cause and effect.
Thus, within this exhibition – which must be viewed with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled via Preferences → Graphics for those using a non-PBR enabled viewer, Traci offers a series of panoramic (in terms of their image ratio) pictures, each one carrying within it the sense of a theme – buildings, nature, walls, plants. However, each image is fragmented into a series of elements, often presenting a different view of the same central object, each element within the complete picture carrying a beat of not-quite repetition which is almost musical in form.
Words flow through each image collage, words which Traci declares them as extracted lines from songs; however, they have about them a similar beat, one suggestive of thoughts of the past and half-reminded reflections, so matching the manner in which the images suggest juxtaposed remembrances a a half-forgotten memory. Also present within each canvas are what might been seen as reflections of other images, small and distant – or might they be reflections of the same image? – further enhancing the idea of fragmented memories (or desires, perhaps?), confused and overlaying one another.
So it is that -perhaps – within these images we might see personified the idea that far from being a cohesive set of steps, life really is a string of interconnected events of happenstance; some of which might well appear to be repeated (and thus give rise to our desire to understand there is a purpose to it all), when in truth there is nothing of the kind; no preordination; just random collisions of planned and unplanned events which push us onwards whilst leaving us to look back and reflect and try to make sense of it all.Or, perhaps as Traci disarmingly suggests in her third introduction to Fragments, these are images reflective of a random desire to create, trapped between hangovers and called into being by a lucid turn behind the camera lens and when hand and eye work in unison to tweak pixels on a screen. But even if the latter is true (which I somehow doubt); does this actually negate the underpinning theme offered through the first two introductions?
SLurl Details
- Fragments at Inspire Space Park / Art Planet (Shinda, rated General)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 