Jeremy Shaw
29.5. – 31.8.2025
Jeremy Shaw works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience. Often combining and amplifying strategies of vérité filmmaking, conceptual art, music video and scientific research, he creates a post-documentary space that complicates expectations of image as a form of testimony. For example, in his immersive Phase Shifting Index (2020), Shaw created a seven-channel video, sound and light installation that uses science fiction, documentary, visual effects and synchronization to complicate narrative temporality. Employing various outmoded twentieth-century media, ranging from 16mm film to Hi8 videotape, Shaw presents what appears to be archival documentary footage as the distant future, creating cognitive dissonance within the viewers’ relation to a sense of place and time.
In recent works, the artist has returned to physical objects that look towards universal aspirations of infinity and the often-fraught attempts to illustrate them. There in Spirit (2024) is a sculptural installation featuring 165 LED candles housed in red glasses and arranged in rows on a steel votive stand. The randomly flickering candles slowly evolve to form a single-point perspective vortex animation that builds to a feverish speed. The hypnotic dramaturgy imagines the accumulated actions of prayer, piety, and devotion as manifested via an interplay of light, shadow, movement and sound. Maximum Horizon (2024) combines traditional techniques of stained-glass window production with representations of the infinite commonly found across twentieth-century popular media. This replication of the majesty of religious iconography fused with ubiquitous science fiction and computer graphic illustrations of the wormhole, the vortex, the digital horizon, explicitly merges sacred and profane elements to imagine the potential of modern, technologically-driven belief systems and their aspirations of transcendence.
geboren 1977 in North Vancouver, lebt in Berlin.