John Richey

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Artist statement

I make hand-painted video animations, sculptural installations, and digitally fabricated commonplace objects using themes and images borrowed from various personal collections. My most recent body of work seeks to allow elements of chance and flexibility into a labor-intensive process that grapples with the transformative nature of information; including information retention and loss. By working back-and-forth between, and with different combinations of hand-made and digitally fabricated elements, my work investigates physical or conceptual glitches that occur in the spaces between the human and the digital. I’ve recently incorporated cyanotypes into my practice in order to engage with how themes of stability and entropy can coexist in a single discrete work. My creative instinct is to be very rigid and controlled but by using the cyanotype process, which is notoriously unwieldy and unpredictable, I am forced outside my comfort zone and pushed into new territory. This collection of unique works also reference the natural world and alludes to the fleeting ephemerality of the spaces around us. Each vibrant blue and white composition recalls a memory or essence; wispy cloud formations as viewed through a window screen, liquid drips on a car window after the rain, and distorted swimming pool tiles as glimpsed through the surface of shimmering water.

Artwork