Big Red is the first in a series called The Red Paintings, a set of three monumental 3D animations for projection. Expanding on early twentieth-century still-life painting from the School of Paris, I was inspired by the significant collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and my work there with School of the Art Institute of Chicago media art students, in dialog with both the canonical Art Institute still-lives and its Chair of 19th and 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, the art historian Gloria Groom.

In the context of our post-digital moment, I used the compositional structures of the red paintings by Henri Matisse to propose a paradigm shift in painting practice, creating monumental animations at real-painting scale. Reminiscent but very different from Matisse’s static images, I animated images-within-images, as architectures open onto windows and doors that in turn open onto simulated landscapes and rooms bestowed with animated paintings, carpets and wallpapers. My animations in this series are like digital, pictorial clockworks in which wheels within wheels turn at different rates and temporal schemes to mesmerize viewers, ushering them into a state of contemplation.

I think of Big Red as an antidote to a world in crisis as it transits into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and social foment. In Big Red, time is fluid and elastic, in constant flux and multi-directional, where all is in motion and mutable though nothing is actually happening. This is a different notion of time, an unstable present, in which viewers may experience through the possibility of simulation-technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future and present into a perpetual now.