ERIC DYER
Shabamanetica #1 and #2 2017, steel, walnut, UV-cured pigment on aluminum, 98"x90"x48" (each)
Shabamanetica #1 and #2 source images, shot on-location, from Shanghai, Baltimore, and Panama: three places connected anew by the recent expansion of the Panama Canal and dredging of the Port of Baltimore in preparation for the gigantic Neopanamax container ships. Shabamanetica #1 presents a counter-rotating ‘machine’ made of Panama Canal lock-gates, tugs, and ships that suck cargo from Shanghai and spit out an endless supply of poop-emoji pillows that are immediately disposed of by a garbage truck. In Shabamanetica #2, ‘ghosts’ of Baltimore’s lost umbrella industry (long ago Baltimore was the umbrella-manufacturing capital of the world) fly over a landscape of Panama’s highland waterfalls where Shanghai students, growing up in China’s current industrial revolution, play with their parasols.
Empower 2017, UV-cured pigment on polycarbonate, 44"x44"x6"
A leader's rhetoric of hate empowers those with violent tendencies.
Girona Octopi 2016, synthetic inkjet print, interactive crank box, live video, 18'x18'
My earliest memory of being captivated by an animal in motion was formed at the age of 14 while snorkeling off the coast of Spain. I reached out to hold on to an underwater rock and nearly touched a well-camouflaged octopus. It darted away, leaving a cloud of ink in its wake. The complex, compound motion of its tentacles mixed with the ink-cloud filled me with wonder and fascination. With Girona Octopi I attempt to recreate these emotions for the public. Viewers enter the imagery, see an aerial view of themselves in the projection, and activate the animation by turning a small crank (that also activates a soundtrack of a traditional Spanish melody). The crank box evokes Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope- a device he invented to project his own studies of animals in motion. In this video, the piece is installed at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX. Aurora commissioned this work and the UMBC Imaging Research Center funded the technology development. Mark Murnane was the system's engineer.
Mud Caves #2 2017, UV-cured pigment on polycarbonate, mechanism, sync strobe, 47"x47"x4"
For the creation of Mud Caves #2, I camped in and hiked through a desert canyon-land two hours east of San Diego, CA. I searched for kinetic moments in this stillest places, soon realizing it was my own changing perspective that created motion. I took sequences of photos as I moved past and around the formations that were sculpted by water over millions of years. The artwork is my own temporal version of the traditional western landscape panorama.
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Eadweard's Menagerie 2017, UV-cured pigment on polycarbonate, mechanism, sync strobe, 47"x47"x4"
Eadweard Muybridge, widely known as the Grandfather of Motion Pictures, revealed the hidden moments of human and animal locomotion with his hundreds of sequential photographic studies. While his male subjects hammer anvils, box, and ride horses, several of his female nudes pour buckets of water over each other, kiss, and fall onto mattresses, landing with buttocks presented. One hundred and twenty years before the pornographic Girls Gone Wild franchise launched, Muybridge directed nude women to perform exploitive actions in front of his array of cameras. In Eadweard’s Menagerie, I placed a collection of these sequences into little virtual boxes under the gaze of a giant Muybridge, who posed nude for a number of his own studies. I digitally smoothed the subjects’ motion, adding images to the sequences that never before existed, making them feel as if they might break free of their eternal subjugation and speak out in today’s #metoo milieu.
Baldwin Geotrope #1 2016, video, 2:03
An experiment in landscape-based animated form, the shape was cut into dense grass then photographed with a drone and spun in the computer.