Publication.
Dan Holdsworth creates large-scale photographs and digital art characterized by the use of traditional techniques and unusually long exposure times and by radical abstractions of geography. “Spatial Objects” results from Holdsworth’s ongoing enquiry into contemporary photographic imaging processes and what he calls the “surface interface of the image.” In computer science, spatial objects refer to values that exist within a specific place simultaneously in the real and the virtual spheres. The starting point for his Spatial Objects series is U.S. Geological Survey mapping data of the American West; it also draws on the vocabulary of Minimalist sculptural practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Holdsworth transposes aerially scanned scientific data of geological landscapes into 3D virtual models, working deep within the material to explore the underpinning architecture of the virtual. Going beyond the limits of representation, what one sees in these works are the edges and fragments of the pixel resolved within the geometry of the interface itself, transformed into structures of pure colour and light, with an essay by Alistair Robinson.