Shona Masarin

ARTIST STATEMENT

This body of work is an attempt to conjure images and experiences of a future world. It is my version of science fiction, of a post-apocalyptic space. A space in which the future is transformed into form, which can’t be clearly explained, though it might be richly experienced. Making this work was a way to remind myself of the temporality and impermanence of all objects, physical and mental. Escaping from the current moment, for me, entails thinking about the scale of time. What existed 4 billions years ago? What civilizations lived and died? What will exist 4 billion years from now? I have been on this earth for just 37 years. Suddenly, when I think of all of this, today feels different.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots and details of Shona Masarin’s photographic and film work, along with a video of an in-progress film. In-depth written descriptions of the photographs and video, which provide visual, contextual, and other sensory information, are below the image gallery and video. Audio recordings of this material are available through the SoundCloud embedded above.

IMAGE GALLERY & DESCRIPTIONS

INSTALLATION

Shona Masarin’s works are hung on a wall at the far back of the EFA Project Space gallery, a grid of four photographs anchoring the exhibition. To their left is a wall of windows, and sitting on a window ledge close to the back wall is a 57” monitor where the film Untitled (Chasm) plays in a loop. To the right of the grid of photographs sits a small pedestal about 3’ high, with a thin light box/tablet housing 4”x5” negatives.

A Tomb, a Womb, a Chasm (series), 2020, chromogenic prints, 30” x 37.39” each. 

A grid of four images depict a series of overlapping white, blue, and black shapes; it is unclear which of the forms are shadow and which are the shapes casting them. It’s as if we’re zoomed in on something too close to see. Or perhaps what is shown is perceived by a means other than vision. Though the image does not depict a landscape, there is a kind of proprioception of space, perhaps of being underwater or underground, but there is nothing recognizable to define where the image takes place. Whatever the space, it seems to be lit by flickering light, even though the images are still. Forms block the light at angles bound neither to the vertical nor horizontal nor to gravity, becoming silhouetted and also seemingly weightless, as if the forms are vaporous. The quality of the images and the shapes resemble a kind of medical imaging or another means of sensing interiority––that doesn’t yet exist of body parts not yet known or maybe just not known at the moment. 

Untitled (Chasm) (work in progress), 2020-ongoing, 16mm film transferred to HD video, silent, 2:28 min.

The film is shot in black and white. It begins with flickering and the traces of grain on 16 mm film, followed by a series of slow, tilting upward movements of the camera passing over alternating sections of black shadow and amorphous white light. This motion is periodically interrupted by a shadow enveloping the image. Then the film cuts back to tilting upward motion, which slowly traces a long pattern of light carved out by shadow. As the camera begins moving over this pattern, the light begins to take on form, briefly seeming liquid but then perhaps appearing to bounce off a flat, solid reflective surface. As overlapping shapes of white light overlap and grow hazy, the light appears smokey and gaseous. Then the light loses shape as it covers more of the frame than the shadow, making the black take on form as if the silhouette of a landscape or body. White shapes begin to emerge from the shadow again, now some of which are reminiscent of lines of bone and their hazy outer glow on an x-ray before dissolving into gray shapes that then disappear into shadow. The camera briefly traces the snaking outline of a curvy cut of light into the black background as other hazy white and gray shapes emerge on either side. The camera continues to move over the image, where shadow and light alternately carve out a ridged amoeba-like outline that changes form, depending on whether you focus attention on the white or the black as the figure or ground. Suddenly, the form itself begins to move without the assistance of the camera; the white light forms begin to overlap like many layers of transparency film, passing over one another like memories are often depicted in films by layering one image on top of another, being in more than one time and place at once. The shadow begins to resemble a figure again, now squeezed in and out as the camera pans across it. The shadow seemingly stretches to its limit, fracturing into the white light before extending further at times looking like the outline of mountain peaks or humps. The camera flickers again, then passes over more forms blurring like an x-ray view of either body or land. The camera shakes as it briefly passes over two cloudy dark forms that resemble fleshy organs on an MRI. The shapes themselves also move as the camera moves over more shapes, some of which are hazy, some of which are more distinct like how someone might draw the outline of a wave. The overlapping objects move at different speeds but seem inexorably pulled off frame as the camera pans in the opposite direction, at moments flickering from something caught in the filmstock itself and obscured hazy in a gray wing-like shape before fading into black. 

Untitled (work in progress), 2019-ongoing, 4x5 film negatives, plexiglass, lightbox. 

Six colorful negatives of abstract shapes and forms are arranged in a grid on a lightbox. Each negative depicts a combination of overlapping, largely geometric shapes such as rectangles and circles mixed with curving, sometimes zig zagging combinations of light and shadow. The colors are vibrant and almost neon in some cases, ranging from lime green and hot pink to turquoise and yellow to umber and forest green. Some of the images look like expressionistic landscapes, others like an eye with extra layers of irises, others like futuristic architecture from a sci-fi film in uninhabited worlds. 

ARTIST BIO

Shona Masarin is an Australian lens-based artist whose work explores phenomenology and qualities of visual perception. Working exclusively with the medium of analog film, her abstract animations and photographs seek to touch, explore, and recreate the experience of seeing and feeling. She has received funding for her work from the Jerome Foundation, The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, and the Knockdown Center, amongst others. She holds a BFA in film and video from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.