Ansen Seale
Ansen Seale (b. 1960, Texas, USA) is an artist based in San Antonio, Texas. His time-based works of photographic art have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally and have been collected by corporate, institutional and private collectors. In 2009, he received the Bernard Lifshutz Award in the Visual Arts from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio and his work is in the permanent collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, Austin and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Salta, Argentina.
Seale works with a special digital camera of his own invention. This camera has the ability to capture a vertical slice of the scene over and over in rapid succession, in effect, swapping the horizontal dimension of the photo for the dimension of time. Instead of mirroring the world as we know it, this camera records a hidden reality. The apparent “distortions” in the images all happen in-camera as the image is being recorded.
HI John,
Thanks for your kind and thoughtful critique. Quite right that the use of radial symmetry is nothing new in art. Used by artists for centuries, it goes to the very root of our perception. For example, it's why we think flowers are beautiful. It's one of the archetypal compositional patterns that conveys peace, serinity and, yes, a sense of the infinite.
My technique is decievingly more complicated than it looks. I use some custom software to create "a circle within a square" that is more than just a circular kaleidoscopic image.
Look for more to come....