MATHEW BORRETT
HYPERNURNIA
OCTOBER 7 TO OCTOBER 31, 2015
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY OCTOBER 9, 6 - 9 PM
The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present HyperNurnia an exhibition by artist Mathew Borrett.
Mathew Borrett presents a series of panoramic landscapes teeming with intricate detail, each one a small world unto itself. The viewer is drawn into dreamlike places where architectural forms blur into natural ones. The artist generates these through a unique marriage of craft and chaos.
“I’m interested in exploring ways to digitally automate the creation of vast scenes, and use them as foundations for large drawings. I opt to allow a large amount of chance into the proceedings, a partnership of sorts which greatly enhances my sense of discovery while making the work.
I begin by modeling a set of building blocks - rocks, trees, buildings, abstract shapes. Then I arrange thousands of duplicates of these across a terrain. Some of these are positioned by hand, but mostly it’s accomplished by programming a set of rules to guide their placement. Example rules might be: "Trees are only allowed to grow on flat areas", or "rocks may only appear above 10 meters of altitude". This gives rise to a living pattern of objects in 3D space, driven by my choices in concert with fractal noise-based randomness. Tweaking rules causes the pattern to shift and morph in response. The emergent shapes are often predictable, but sometimes unexpected juxtapositions appear, offering the opportunity to steer the landscape in a new direction.
After much exploration and layering of complexity, the final stage is to fix the pattern into a rendered image. I paint into it, adding a layer of subtle hand-drawn detail. Features are enhanced or pushed back in order to create a more balanced composition.”
BIO
Mathew Borrett is a Toronto-based artist and illustrator who has worked in the visual effects industry for TV and film. Recently he has been exploring ways to blend his work in traditional drawing with digital techniques. He graduated from the illustration program from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 1998.
