Sudden Change, 6' x 8’. All images courtesy the artist
Since the 60s, conceptual artist Tom Shannon has been playing at the intersection between art, science, and technology. Perhaps best known for sculptures that incorporate magnetism and counter-balance, Shannon is also recognized for paintings created with techniques that utilize the properties of physics, optics, electricity and vibration, amongst other scientific principles and phenomena. For his latest show, The First Six Aerial Paintings, Shannon created a series of works using a term he calls "aerial painting," which creates outward 3D effects when viewers gaze hypnotically at the 2D canvases; visualizing a z-axis by instinctively positioning shapes along an x-y plane.
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In a preview of the show, Shannon tells The Creators Project that he has always been interested in optical effects. The lifelong fascination began when he saw Arch Oboler’s 1952 3D adventure film Bwana Devil—a film that helped spark the 3D craze of the ‘50s.
Tom Shannon
Shannon says that the works in The First Six Aerial Paintings, including the space’s floor itself (outfitted with a matrix of tape that creates yet another illusion), was also inspired by a DMT trip he experienced. In that trip, Shannon saw a floor thick with networks, hexagons, traffic and lights, and many other things.“With this, I tried to bring that back as a souvenir from that trip and share that feeling of there not being a floor, and feeling that spaced-out feeling,” Shannon says. “In that trip I didn’t know if I was alive or dead—I was in some space that was independent of any space that I had ever been in, and you don’t really know where you are at that point.”
Bardo Days, 6' x 8’
Shannon points to the painting Bardo Days, which features an array of triangles, hexagons, pentagons, circles and squares, as another fruit of that DMT trip. He considers the experience to have been an important transition into the artwork he is making now. The aptly-titled XYZ3DMT, which resembles the floor’s grid, is also a relic of this trip.“In Bardo Days there are 49 elements in it like the 49 days after you kick it [from The Tibetan Book of the Dead],” Shannon explains. “I was just interested in using that as a point of departure, or a calendar of events. All of the shapes have the same measure around their parameter.”
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Installation view
Shannon painted Bardo Days with a paint pigment-in-soap solution, which he applied with little yellow forms. The effect Bardo Days is that the 49 shapes seem to extend outward toward the viewer. But what's also interesting is that parts of the negative space between the shapes have an illuminated quality, which is a bit of its secondary allure. Shannon says this illusion is probably due to an afterimage left on the eye that fills the void between objects.Of all of the show’s paintings, Sudden Change is perhaps the most striking. The layout of the shapes is similar to Bardo Days, but Shannon’s colorful, overlapping and intersecting circles give the painting an even more psychedelic air than the others. As the painting that greets viewers as they walk into the pop-up exhibition space, it also functions as the piece that helps bring people out of their quotidien optical realities.
Solid Interval, 6' x 8’
For the painting Solid Interval, Shannon used tape to section off shapes, then painted the canvas blue with an acrylic paint he mixes himself. The shapes are arranged in parallel and oriented diagonally. Like the show’s other paintings, if the viewer gazes deeply enough, its shapes and patterns leap off the canvas into the space between painting and viewer.“One of the things about it is when you look at it, the intervals become 3D objects in themselves,” Shannon explains. “There are a lot of artefacts in our vision. Normally when you look at a painting, you just look at it, but with this you’re more obliged to trance out. And when that trance happens and it opens up to you, it’s like getting high or something. You’ve broken from your normal way of looking.”
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