| SELECTION OF SOUND AND MOTION WORKS
“I started my first sound and motion pieces soon after treatment, when I came across a family album. I realized that I was almost the last surviving member of my family… and that realization, coupled with treatment side-effects, led to this exploration of time and memory. I wanted to know, if we're the sum of what we remember, then what happens when we begin to forget? And that question provoked four years of work — and the recognition that reality is fractured, stitched together to create order from chaos."
61 | 2018
Re-photographing images taken from a family album, Van Eyssen erases and reveals memories of the past in momentary fragments — acknowledging that while time eradicates and distorts events, the ‘mysterious original’ is truly recalled as a multi-sensory experience, not simply a photographic representation of the past.
12E | 2019
Combining Super-8 footage which the artist shot in New York in 1974 with video and photographs of present-day Los Angeles, 12E compresses past and present in a continuum of shifting sound and motion. Merging childhood memory with images from the everyday world, Van Eyssen explores impermanence — and the narratives that exist for each of us in a personal quadrant of time and space.
Mother | 2019
A two-screen study of a woman’s face as reconstituted by the process of remembering. Interference patterns and the use of adjacent color values throughout the work create an ethereal image that appears to fade and materialize.
Self | 2020
Conflating images taken on Ireland’s west coast and in Los Angeles, Van Eyssen’s Self is both a portrait of the artist and the acknowledgment that the story we construct around identity is fractured, fluid, and subject to the same disintegrating forces as the narratives we construct around others. Auto-photographic images with the subject holding the camera, like those in Self, began when Van Eyssen documented his experiences during medical treatment — as he says, “The self-portraits taken at that time were a kind of psychological insurance… proof that I still existed."
And Then I Saw You Green | 2020
What began as the final section of a four work series about the human relationship to the environment took an unexpected direction in the early months of the pandemic. "I began this piece in 2020. The abrupt loss of a close friend and, a week later, the eruption of social justice protests in Los Angeles, framed a dark season. Several weeks ago, I found myself paring the imagery back, removing anything that felt extraneous. The result is a more acute exploration of memory, and its seductive influence on the past… and a heightened sense of renewal and rebirth.”
They Drive At Night | 2021
4K sound and motion work that examines the the ambiguity of measured time — and the circularity of past, present, and future. Repeatedly, a car travels backwards and forwards along a hillside road at night, gradually creating a continuous stream of light that bisects the mountain’s silhouette.
With modified audio of Uranus' electromagnetic field recorded from Voyager.
And Then The Tide Runs Out | 2021
This single panel video work, which is part self-portrait, offers a meditation on climate change, and questions the relationship of the observer to the environment. Figures dance on the beachfront, or gaze passively from a chair, as a California sunset, or sunrise, drenches the scene in apocalyptic tones, and the tide rolls backwards, out to sea. Accompanying the moving image is a recording of a freeway, punctuated by fading signals from an echocardiogram.
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home | 2022
An 8K dual screen, sound and motion work that contemplates mortality, and the mystery of time. Occupying the central panel, an elderly figure (joined intermittently by the artist) reminisces — oblivious to the arrival and departure of public transportation, cars passing, shadow figures crossing stations and empty fields, and the silhouette of a forest emerging from the wallpaper behind him.
Published in 1977, Craig Raine’s poem, A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, imagines the world from the detached perspective of an alien visitor — human behavior, and the objects that populate our world, observed as strange and puzzling phenomena. “The poem had a profound effect on me when when I first read it at fifteen. In a way, we’re doing a similar thing, causing the ordinary world to be seen again — which I do by changing time signatures and directions, and arranging disconnected objects and places in a sequence that alters the way you look at them.”