Lee Arnold
Time - Image

February 12 - May 2, 2010

Lee Arnold creates drawings, paintings, photographs, films, videos, and animations. His solo exhibition at the DCCA concentrates on digital animation with sound, and its title, Time- Image, is a reference to Gilles Deleuze's influential texts on cinema and the moving image.  For Deleuze, cinema is the location of pure existence and sensation, its own reality, and the expression of pure thought. Arnold’s work evokes this understanding of time-based media; it straddles the formal and the conceptual and is both mysterious and atmospheric. His elegant and aesthetic animations utilize sequential images of pure color, gradual shifts in light, and collages of fragmented photographs. Arnold was trained as a painter and also has a background in music. He states of his turn to the computer, “When I found it [the software After Effects] I felt I was someone discovering my medium. I finally felt at home.”¹ For the animation Ice, with music by Hans Otte from The Book of Sounds, Arnold creates time-lapse photography of ice melting on a window on a winter morning in Vermont. Clouds, another animation, is comprised of time-lapse photography of the changing sky over Brooklyn shot during a single fall day, also set to music. Blue Green Grey, according to the artist, represents a meditation on the temporal use of modal color and value to unify a fragmented Maine landscape into a unified whole, while Twenty-Four Colors is a series of gradients that represent the changing light of a cloudless sky over the course of a full twenty-four hour day. Like Deleuze, who wrote poetically about the transcendental domain of sensibility, Arnold explores the sensual realm of vision and sound, seeking out the sublime aspects of the visual world.

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¹Interview by Roberta Fallon of Lee Arnold. http://theartblog.org/2008/08/lee-arnolds-digital-landscapes-of-the-soul/