Werner Sun

BIO

Werner Sun lives and works in Ithaca, NY, and his work has appeared in the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Aon (New York, NY), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and the Islip Art Museum. His essays and images have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Interalia Magazine, and Stone Canoe. He is the 2019 recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award from the CUE Art Foundation, and a 2017 recipient of a Strategic Opportunity Stipend from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, NY. Werner recently completed a photographic sculpture commission for the Cornell Botanic Gardens.

STATEMENT

My work as an artist straddles boundaries; it is both two- and three-dimensional, both digital and analog. My process typically begins with taking photographs and reconfiguring them using a variety of repetitive, labor-intensive procedures, often applied recursively. The scrambled images that emerge from this process show a fascinating interplay between pattern and complexity. My interest in these algorithmic transformations stems from my past experience as a physicist, in which I used computational algorithms extensively to analyze scientific data. Indeed, digital photographs are simply data (pixels) stored as numbers on a computer. So, my artistic interpretations of digital images are analogous to the rational interpretations of data in my scientific work.

However, unlike with science, I execute these visual algorithms primarily by hand, whether by sculpturally recomposing images using paper engineering techniques or by embellishing them with geometric mark-making. My attachment to the handmade is a reflection of my impulse to balance the analytic character of science with a more personal approach towards data. In manipulating my materials with deliberate slowness, I gain access to knowledge that is experiential and provisional, capable of encompassing multiple perspectives at once, along with their inevitable contradictions and ambiguity.