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Hellblau is a directory of collected images tracking the material essence of a specific type of light blue or sky blue in relation to distance, technology, fetish, power, interface, packaging, and void. This more filtered shade of “Blue.0” is often used to represent a sort of accessible omnipresence as an interface for control. After collecting samples of this source material in the live image stream on Tumblr, a frozen and exported version of it took shape for a gallery presentation.
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The directory, like the hellblau material itself, can be endlessly sourced and continues to grow and evolve. The overall conceptual cohesion between the images is what gives it its natural and “raw” form, which in this first instance was a sampling of synthetic foam icebergs and a plastic selection pool filled with water. The iceberg images could be combined in endless dramaturgies, floating on the top layer of this ocular pool like a shattered film over a liquid lens. Indeed this material is not just a wrapper or coating for these products and situations, but a filtered “tracking lens” used to locate the most sinister instances of it. It’s the package and environment of a specific view expressed through pointed scenes - extracted slabs from a larger mass of of an abundant problem.
In a blended ecosystem of virtual and physical, the artist locates and defines a specific material in the current environment of the times (straight from the tube, cinematography), then extracts it and uses it in methods informed by current multimedia software and equipment as means toward a critical examination and statement. She is pointing out and describing her main topics through the properties, through the lens, of this medium while also creating a vista of its landscape. The synthetic mimicking of natural tropes is a further expression of this networking and blurring of image ecologies. While the “frozen” hellblau material resembles natural ice, it’s more like a solidified chemical goo. To take the elemental form of naturally available language is just another example of its subtle but darker intentions.
-From the artist’s statement
