Realform presents Scott Kiernan: Extra Special Ops Curated by Jennifer Junkermeier

Be an eyewitness to the Zenith Foundation induced spectacle of information and visual overload. Kiernan’s multimedia video installation, more potent at night, incorporates homespun technology that appropriates population growth simulations systems projected onto mountains of sand and silica. Extra Special Ops is installed in the window space of Realform Project Space on Bedford Ave, the heart of an area that continues to experience population booms at rapidly growing rates. With this in mind, it allows passersby to reflect on transformations around them through colorful abstractions, moving forms and patterns. Realform Project Space is pleased to present Scott Kiernan: Extra Special Ops curated by Jennifer Junkermeier.

In “Extra Special Ops”, pixilated versions of four chance derived blown ink drawings go through cellular automata processes to simulate imagined population growths over dunes of snow white silica sand. Kiernan uses John Conway’s “Game of Life” (an early virtual intelligence model) as a catalyst for the sculpture, changing the context of these cell divisions through choice of materials and presentation. Now the abstract figures resemble data with no fixed value; and the data in the program itself becomes meditative. These patterns play over white noise, as populations divide and conquer, creating a shifting topology over the sand relief akin to battlefield strategies. The reflection on the sand creates an illusion of color chaotically mingling within a field of snow. Disturbing patterns of life and death are created, released, dispersed and run rampant throughout the work, running on a continuous loop.

The ZENITH FOUNDATION is the name given to my ongoing multi disciplinary collage of cannibalistic and mutating work. The name itself is a bit of a play on words. A “zenith” can be broadly described as the point directly over your head, so the (zenith’s) “foundation” would be you, the observer. However, the two words together also imply an anonymous entity/organization that acts to deliver my missives to the world. Other definitions of the word zenith yield similarly interesting connotations.

Some themes that I continually mine in my work include: the physical manifestations of desire, anxiety, and paranoia; the traces left by sound, light and other forms dismissed as immaterial; a romantic skewing of the forms created by “logic”, and a continual search for “everything in everything”. I am drawn to psychedelia, déjà vu, synaesthetic experiences, absurdity and “pseudoscience”. I am against “commonsense” in its most literal form, fixed definitions and limited use. I work in any medium (usually several at once), though sound and its visual analogues often guide the work. The “grand collage” of the ZENITH FOUNDATION has also extended into a parallel practice of handmade bookmaking, assemblages, mail art, and home-recording which both reflects and guides its evolution. –Scott Kiernan