Dan Holdsworth: Spatial Objects

18 Jan-17 Mar 2019

Overview

Holdsworth’s Spatial Objects are strange, alluring portraits of the ‘objects' that every one of us encounters every day, and which are the building blocks of vision in a digital age, but which ordinarily lie beyond our perception. The titular ‘objects’ are single “data points” – pixels marking a unique point in space, as GPS co-ordinates. The starting point for these works has been geological mapping data from the US Geological Survey of Crater Lake, a protected National Park in the western United States. When transformed into a 3D model, the data allows us to see every single point in the landscape in virtual space. Holdsworth has created photographs of individual pixels, blown-up to a scale that they become possessed of a monumental physicality. In each work, we encounter the edges of an individual plane of one pixel: each image shows only “a fragment of a fragment” of the landscape, in the artist’s own words. Here, we experience the space of nature just as it is mediated through our omnipresent screens – as pure RGB colour and light.