British artist David Spriggs creates stunning three dimensional art installations that lie in a space between 2 and 3 dimensions. These unique artworks overwhelm the viewer, by bringing together painting, drawing, photography, digital-modeling, and sculpting, to create a spatial topographic system
Spriggs’ artworks are made with superimposed layers of thin translucent film enclosed in Plexiglas, a technique he developed in 1999. The goal was to create the illusion of a three-dimensional landscape by using two dimensional elements, he has been exploring and perfecting this technique ever since. By giving his works a carefully crafted dynamic dimension, David Spriggs plays with the usual conventions of artistic representation in a clever way, he instills his works movement, combined with a sense of discovery as the images slowly “reveal” themselves to the viewer.
In order to compose his amazing art installations, initially Spriggs airbrushes two-dimensional images onto multiple sheets of transparent film, then the transparent films are positioned together, one in front of the other, to form a three dimensional object. The exhibited form is defined by the horizontal cuts and changes form depending on the viewing angle, essentially dismantling itself and coming together again in an act of cinematic play. His amorphous objects have the appearance of being suspended, contained and locked in a frozen moment, where time becomes a stratified cartography. The forms are illuminated and encased in museological terrariums (like scientific controlled experiments) becoming “alienated from their surroundings and open to observation and interpretation”.
These spectacular installation based artworks are in constant vacillation between the worlds of 2D and 3D, exploring the use of three-dimensional space in an innovative, unexpected and almost scientific way. His thick, deep frames invite you to get lost within their painted folds, layering images on top of each other to create an impossible depth. The subjects depicted in his work relate to the breakdown and recreation of form and volume, and to complicated and multidimensional terms, such as “power”, “vision” and “perception”. These complex meanings are resented visually by forces, such as cyclone, explosions and clouds.
David Spriggs is currently based in Montreal. He was born in 1978 in Manchester, England, and immigrated to Canada in 1992. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He recently participated in the Public Art and New Artistic Strategies program at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and has exhibited his work in New York, Toronto, London, Calgary, Vancouver and Germany.
