Steven Pestana: Dawning at Peep Space

Featured Artist

In Steven Pestana’s imaginative mixed media installation at Peep Space, light, shadow, projection and reflection integrate through poetic transitions and passages. The show runs from May 20th through June 19th, 2022.

What is the idea behind this show, and can you guide us through?

We tend to underestimate how much of our thinking triangulates on pre-existing ideas. All our experiences get processed through existing conceptual vocabularies, and these vocabularies have long histories. But what happens when our experience doesn’t align with an existing vocabulary? One example is in times of uncertainty (like our own). When important matters can change radically at any given moment, we lose the ability to anchor ourselves to a stable foundation.

As I created the artworks in Dawning, uncertainty, the ambiguous, and the opaque were all on my mind. How do we move from ambiguity to some form of understanding? To capture this transition, a series of three 10 foot tall metal arches called Passagers guide visitors through the space. The “arches” are actually silhouettes of different architectures: a master plan for an Early Modern military fort; a collection of 20th Century utopian buildings; and the timeless pure geometry of architectural structure. A sort of prismatic beacon, titled Lumen’s Flyway, traverses the length of the wall.

Throughout, translucent textiles obscure, reveal or frame smaller artifacts. The first, titled Scholar, superimposes a glass etching over a metal etching with a bronze four-winged bird dangling alongside. A double-sided painting on translucent polypropylene, Lacunae in 3rd and 5th Positions, is framed by shadows. A Short Account of an Imaginary Event is a video envisioning the transit of imaginary cloud across an imaginary eclipse. Each of these embodies an index or archive of passage.

A notable addition to my repertoire was the use of text-to-image machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that generates original images from plain-language descriptions. We are accustomed to screen-based images being a type of copy, but here they are the original. These computer generated images, which never happened or existed before, seem “real” but alien. I found their attempts at approximating some form of humanity to be an ideal expression of the ambiguous. They found their way into the uncanny humanesque forms in Scholar and the silk textiles of Passagers.

In Dawning, the alien is always haunting the familiar: ghosts of the past that we only come to know through their shadows and reflections.

Photo Credit: Sophia Sobers; Photo Courtesy of the Artist

Steven Pestana, Dawning at Peep Space, May 20th to June 19th, 2022 , Opening Reception: Fri, May 20th, 7-10pm, 92 Central Ave, Tarrytown, NY 10591

Steven Pestana, a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY, was raised in South Florida before studying Art History at New York University and Digital Media at Rhode Island School of Design.