Stephen Calhoun, born 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio USA, is a self-taught artist working in a variety of modalities, most prominently photography, mixed process photography, and generative art. His use of technology counts him as a digital artist since 2003. His recent work is centered on applying geometric iterations and mirror symmetries to source images. Often the source materials are a still life he constructs in his outdoor or indoor studio.
His one man exhibit, THE GRASP OF ORDER, was installed between May-September 2016 at The Gallery At Gray's, Cleveland, Ohio. His show verified his artistic goal, that lively, complex images would capture the attention of the viewer and inspire them to seek unique findings within each image's visual patterns and relations. His work is at once abstract and archetypal and timeless. In 2016, Confucian Feminine Conduction I. was juried into the exclusive 10th annual OAC-OOVAR Show in Ohio.
About his art, Stephen tells,
"My art’s aim is to grip the viewer, and then inspire the viewer to seek their own unique discoveries in each piece. The pieces present deep opportunities for visual serendipity by drawing the viewer into experiential, insightful, seeking.
I do not create images to pre-program or encode the viewer’s experience. Each piece is underdetermined up to the point of the viewer’s enactive presence and constructive experience.
The pieces aim to invoke a kind of pareidolia. (Pareidolia–the grasp of order from seeming randomness–is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.)
The engaged viewer completes the image’s possible program by virtue of their own subjective and unique experience.
My artistic intention is to evoke the truth of spontaneous discovery. Each piece captures an experimental result. The viewer’s unique encounter and seeking completes the experiment."
