material world
"If we fashion a thing, it is produced by nature and if nature produces a thing, it is fashioned by us."Aristotle, Physics 2.8
Using visual material gathered from various sources, such as magazine cuttings, photographs and found objects, Simeon Nelson conflates the object status of various forms and pictorial surfaces, into two-dimensional patterns resembling the type of cross-sectional studies often associated with scientific research. Walking into the Material World created by Nelson in his recent exhibition of digital lightjet prints was an experience in rapid eye movement, drawing the viewer into the micro details of his constructed world. Reminding me of the sentiment of various Romantic painters such as the nineteenth century British artist John Martin (cataclysmic landscapes offering visual accounts of the reconciliation between Creationism with the developing study known as Paleontology), Nelson's acrylic mounted prints act as two-dimensional portals in which we glimpse the layered photographic intricacies of the contemporary world. This is a world in which patterns and repetition proliferate, where attempts to systematize and order prove ultimately futile and the security of the viewing experience proffered is purely, wonderfully, illusionary.
The deftly flattened layering Nelson achieves in each of these works takes the experience of their constitute elements to another level, that of scientific-styled investigation. And beyond science, these works act also as up-scale embroidery samplers with their characteristic sharpness of pattern, acute symmetry, and the pervading sense of their continuation outside the boundaries of the print. They might be details of greater, more elaborate studies that suggest the existence of grander narratives of order.
John Martin used the visual language of figuration with linear narrative to make sense of the then new science of