Video Works

A 4K single-channel recreation of the traveling camera in and around a 26ft high virtual sculpture.

Encounter and Abduction are best understood as companion pieces—two life-scale virtual sculptures that hold the body in a single, suspended instant. Both freeze a violent transition: in Encounter, the impact of two strangers thrown together; in Abduction, the seizure of a single figure pulled upward and away. In both, the figures are weightless, mid-flight, neither here nor gone.

Where Encounter looks outward—at chance, at strangers, at the choreography of collision—Abduction turns inward. The tractor-beam motif draws on Van Eyssen's earlier work as creator of RCVR, a streaming science-fiction series about alien possession—but here it doubles as a metaphor for four years of cancer treatment, which he describes as "a kind of medical abduction." The figure caught in the green cone functions, by his own admission, as a form of self portrait.

That autobiographical turn gives Abduction its emotional charge. The work began with a public image—commuters immobilized by their phones on a train platform—but resolved into something private: the memory of being severed from the life one knows by the diagnosis of illness and the treatment that follows. It transforms contemporary urban alienation into a more intimate meditation on vulnerability, survival, and the strange unreality of medical time.

A 4K single-screen linear interpretation of the mixed reality installation exhibited at MOCA London.

“Van Eyssen started by creating a series of scans of damaged cars in body shops across Los Angeles. He then digitally stitched the scans together. Later he scanned two professional models, dressed in suits, against green screen in his studio, which were then added to the scene. The tragic drivers appear to be caught in an embrace above the twisted metal. Van Eyssen then added reflective spheres and animated shards of glass to the overall digital sculpture which is over 26 feet long.

Most visitors will be confounded by the experience. The crash is visceral and hits you hard as the metal that crumples before your eyes. The flying glass looks sharp enough to cut you, and you have to duck around the work to completely see and understand how it works in the room. It is very easy to suspend disbelief and walk around the empty gallery as if it were the scene of a violent accident. The suspended embrace is touching, and for a digital work it is amazingly human and humane.” — From Dr. Michael Petry’s catalogue essay

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.”

And Then I Saw You Green | David Van Eyssen (2022)

8K sound and motion work 40 x 136” Composition: Maelik Wulfsohn, performed by Milena Gligic

"I began this piece nearly two years ago. 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, preparing for this installation, 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.”

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A Martian Sends A Postcard Home (2021) is an 8K dual screen (141 × 42″) 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 around him.

Craig Raine’s poem, A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, imagines the world from the detachment 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 I first read it at fourteen, but two couplets still have a special resonance… At night, when all the colors die, / they hide in pairs / and read about themselves — / in color, with their eyelids shut. In a way, we’re doing something similar… causing the ordinary world to be seen again, to be seen as dream, which I do by changing time signatures and directions, and arranging disconnected objects and places in a sequence that alters the way we look at them.”

In Surface, three dancers, inspired by the actions of the Mars Rover, perform a “Martian ballet” on Established & Sons' Surface table, on view for the first time in the US at Twentieth Gallery in Los Angeles. An original design by two Royal Designers for Industry, industrial designer Terence Woodgate and F1 designer John Barnard, the table stands at 6m long with a depth of 4mm , and is constructed entirely of carbon fiber.

Featuring the performances of Candace Cane, Lauren Avon and Ghislain Grellier, video from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, and the first recorded sounds from Mars captured by NASA's Insight rover, Surface also incorporates Mattia Biagi’s tar chandelier, and the paintings of Danielle Albright.

This Razor-Thin Table Inspired an Otherworldly Choreography Routine

The gravity-defying Surface Table, designed by Terence Woodgate and John Barnard for Established & Sons, makes its stateside debut in Los Angeles—and inspires a dance performance in the process.

In 2008, industrial designer Terence Woodgate joined forces with Formula 1 racing car mastermind John Barnard to launch the Surface Table through Established & Sons. Using state-of-the-art carbon fiber technology, the 20-foot-long table seems to defy physics—its razor-thin surface, measuring four millimeters, can easily support the weight of the Formula 1 racing cars that inspired it. Polyurethane lacquer finish—similar to the paint used on vehicles—lends its smooth, ethereal surface a mirror-like sheen.

Despite captivating the international design circuit when it launched, the Surface Table was never shown stateside. Fast forward ten years, however, and Los Angeles design gallery Twentieth is giving the limited-edition work a new home among an impressive lineup of sexy-noir pieces such as Henzel Studio‘s silk rug and a sculptural acrylic chair by Sami Hayek, each in glimmering shades of black that could have come straight from the stratosphere.

The table’s otherworldliness resonated with video artist David Van Eyssen, whose head immediately went to the clouds. “I was struck by the table’s startlingly thin profile, which suggests an endless horizon provoking images of a barren planet—a clean slate on which life could begin again,” he muses. Thus, his latest project was born.

Titled Surface (no relation to this inimitable media brand), the video follows the journey of dancers Candace Cane, Lauren Avon, and Ghislain Grellier as they freely evolve on and under the table. Backdropping the trio is Mattia Biagi’s melting tar chandelier and large-scale photographic prints by Daniele Albright. And much like the Twentieth pieces starring in the video, cosmic references take center stage. Lunar imagery from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and footage of the first-ever video recording from Mars is overlaid, as are sounds of Martian winds captured by the Insight rover. “I suggested that we think about the movement of Insight as it comes to life after landing on alien soil,” says Van Eyssen. “Humans are emulating a machine that, with its outstretched armature and cameras for eyes, emulates humans.”

— Surface Magazine

LG‑Sponsored Exhibition of Digital Works

My first exhibition of digital work was sponsored by LG Electronics and held over ten days in Santa Monica. The show featured eight large-format motion and screen-based pieces, exploring the intersection of memory and time. Using LG’s advanced 4K ultra-short throw projectors and OLED displays, each work was rendered at scale with remarkable clarity and tonal depth.

Rather than positioning technology as a tool behind the scenes, this exhibition placed display itself at the center — transforming LG’s visual hardware into a sculptural medium and proving its potential as a high-resolution canvas for contemporary digital art.