GARY CLEMENCEAU    STATEMENT

Resides:  California

CV

I started out as a photographer. Trained in classical B&W photography at an early age, I had a well-developed sense of light and texture by age ten. By the time I moved on, I was a veteran of FSA Red Bleach, Polysulphide, Selenium, Tetenal Copper, Infrared, Calotypes,  Daguerrotypes, etc. But photography seemed so limiting. Technology would eventually change all that, but we’re not there, yet.

After photography, I was a musician for fourteen years; played professionally for a time, working on a few jazz and classical albums. Then I moved to painting; painted a few abstracts. Then to sculpture, granite and wood. Then to poetry; one small book published. Then to prose; two books published. Then back to photography, albeit the technology of photography and image capture.

I started Smoke City Studio in 1996, to deconstruct and fuse all things analog and digital in the illusion we see all around us, and to export the saturated colors and textures I’d had inside my head since I was a child – colors and textures I often saw when I played or listened to music, or wrote poetry and prose. I began a search for a way to explore an infinite interior space that was both timeless and boundless, trying to create a kind of spiritual snapshot of whatever it is that flows around and through us all the time, in a realm we can’t see but somehow sense and are immanently a prime component. The more I trusted this path, the closer I approached the intersection of art and music and writing, as well as being able to communicate the universality and connectedness I felt we all share at some level beyond clever.

After a decade of excising complementary metal–oxide–semiconductors (CMOS) and charged-coupled devices (CCD) from old digital cameras, wiring them together and running them through powerful magnetic fields, I hit upon a way of throwing myriad color and depth into the pursuit of texture and image, preserving the complex process as a simple photograph and encasing the result in a aluminum/polycarbonate (AL/C) matrix. My subsequent images are a tumultuous marriage of technology and art, developed over the course of half a lifetime of analog and digital experimentation and personal growth, across a range of mediums and disciplines.

Haida artist Bill Reid once said, “Art can never be understood, but can only be seen as a form of magic, the most profound and mysterious of all human activities.” And writer Arthur C. Clarke said that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In there, somewhere, can be found Smoke City Studio.