Andy Pepper Administrator
Hi my name is Cong Keenan and I have been the Creative Director on Medunten Technology. The languages only differ in their grammar, their pronunciation and their most common words
Website URL: http://themesoul.com
Andrew Pepper, besides being an artist, is also a teacher and an organiser of exhibitions and symposia. This threefold vocation, exercised within the context of the art and holography area in which he is a leading figure, is grounded in his artistic and university training. It is also clearly visible in his artistic works and itinerary where it is combined with the idea and the feeling that technological means must be associated with a global human experience in order to enter frankly into the domain of the arts as well as having a true impact on the spectator who is invited to react to the artistic statement in his own way and thus encounter a parallel experience with that of the artist. Pepper’s position as a holographic artist can best be understood if one takes into account that he is both a light artist and a graphic artist. and that his artistic itinerary has led him logically from projected light sculptures to wall based holograms and to holographic floor pieces. In fact, the artist’s main endeavour is to create physical and conceptual links between these three forms of expression.
As a student, Andrew Pepper began working with light to produce installations and animated sculptures. What excited him was the fact that he could almost ‘draw’ in space by using a light projector that enabled him to intercept light with materials such as nylon or string, perspex or smoke. When he discovered holography in 1975, he understood at once that he could, by adopting this technique, counteract the ephemeral nature of his works by recording and documenting these light installations. However, it took Pepper many years to produce the first holograms which satisfied him and which he wanted to exhibit. These formed the Drawing Series of 1987, five wall holograms exploring the use of lines in space and their resulting shadows. A series of very analytical holograms grew out of them exploring the use of shadows and geometric structures.
There followed holograms of drawings which he could modify long after the photographic/holographic/chemical stage was completed, either by working on the surface of the plates, by drawing directly on the glass or by ‘distressing’ the emulsion and removing parts of it to draw ‘into’ the hologram. Andrew Pepper also produced holograms on the floor such as Positive Attempt (1989), a large glass circle with hologram fragments and projected light or Positive Attempt Redrawn (1991), twenty-one individual reflection holograms in three groups, illÌuminated from above with light from a slide projector used to project a drawing onto the floor and the holograms.
Both these floor pieces were conceived as a reaction to, and way of working through, intense personal and family events and confirmed Pepper’s basic engagement in connecting highly technical statements with strong human experiences, an endeavour developed throughout his artistic itinerary and in his other connected professional activities.
Frank Popper
Paris, October 1997
Title: Light Liquid
Date: 2011
Materials: Cut reflection hologram on glass.
Installation: Architect's town-scape model
Notes: First show in Miniments, School of Art and Design, Bonington Building, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.
13th April - 20th May 2011
Title: Lean
Date: 2014
Materials: Digital hologram and shuttered theatrical spotlight
Size: Hologram H 25.4 x W 20.32cm (10 x 8 inches)
Installation: Gallery floor/wall
Notes: First show in Drawology, Lanchester Gallery, Coventry University, UK.
Mon 26 September - 26 October 2014.
This is the first time Pepper has used a digital holographic production process. The 'image/object' within the holographic plate existed, initially, as a series of 'points' within an online 'cloud' 3-D model system.
The resulting physical hologram, on plastic, was produced as a 'test' towards the end of 2013. A way for Pepper to begin to explore the digital process and locate a 'space' and production method which reflected his earlier spatial 'drawings'.
It reiterated some of the hand-drawn works produced in the late 1980's and early 90's, being made up of multiple, individual, points of lights (which in the digital version are 'hogels' - the equivalent of holographic 'pixels'). There is a direct connection between this digital work and Point Addition, an earlier work using much larger points of light separated into five distinct levels in space.
Like many of Pepper's works, they 'sit' in the studio for long periods before being incorporated into installations, and it was not until the summer of 2014 that this first digital experiment became one of the key elements within the 'Lean' installation.
During the Summer Lodge research residency (an annual event at Nottingham Trent University), Pepper had an opportunity to work with large gallery/workshop spaces incorporating theatrical lighting, and it was during this research in July, that the combination of positioning, lighting and angled display was formulated.
Lean was shown for the first time in Drawology at the Lanchester Gallery, Coventry University, UK.
An act of spontaneous placement, propped up 'on the way' to the gallery wall, yet installed with conviction. The marks become framed by their location and the rectangle of light which makes the work visible.
Vertical Overlap - Drawn Transfer
Sunday, 01 September 2013 Published in Holography Be the first to comment!
Title: Vertical Overlap - Drawn Transfer
Date: 2013
Materials: Reflection holograms on glass, wood, plastic.
Size: 26.3 x 25.4 x 20.3 cm, (10.3 x 10 x 8 inches)
During 1999 Pepper began reducing the size of the holographic elements within his works. Partly as a way of exploring the relative impact the holograms had on the overall work or installation, and partly because of an interest in the 'reduced mark' and a way of working which might be more subtle than the more traditional "poke you in the eye" phenomenon which holography has certainly embraced.
Here, in Vertical Overlap - Drawn Transfer, two vertical reflection holograms on glass face each other as they protrude from a low-fi composite wooden base.
Each contains the pseudoscopic image of the shadow of water - dark marks which undulate and shift as an observer moves past them. These motifs have been used by Pepper in earlier works and are particularly evident in Vertical Liquid Supported (shown in Seoul and New York) and Light Liquid which was included in the Miniments exhibition during 2011.
In both of these earlier works Pepper became increasingly interested in the 'peripheral' view - the moment when the 'content' of the hologram becomes visible or 'winks' out of existence. There are times when the holographic element of the installations is not visible at all - requiring a change of location by the observer until they are at a different viewing angle and the image from the hologram becomes visible.
In this piece that act of 'not seeing' is taken to an extreme. Illuminated by two lights, the images from each hologram are reconstructed in a 'traditional' way and in keeping with the optics of the recorded holograms except their images (dark marks) are reconstructed within the space opposite which is occupied by the other hologram. It is not actually possible to 'see' the holographic images (a slight flash of a mark or light can be seen). The piece is entirely promissory and based specifically on the reconstruction geometry of the holographic process and how that is used for display.
SKYLINES is the first publication by Andrew Pepper available on the iBook store and is currently being distributed internationally in 51 countries.
In the summer of 2006 Pepper began taking photographs of Skylines, the junction between objects and the sky around them.
The first was a spontaneous image taken from a garden in LA, looking back toward the house. Since then images have been collected in the United States, Germany and the UK.
The basis for taking each photograph has remained constant: The sky must be blue and there should be an apparent line between the object and the sky.
This publication not only showcases the first series of SKYLINE images, taken between 2006 - 2007, but also includes specially produced drawings (made during 2014) based on the images, as well as an animated view produced from slowly fading, overlapping, examples of a significant SKYLINE in Germany.
An earlier version of this ebook was produced and published on the online Issuu platform as an experiment in ways of displaying and distributing some of the background visual research Andrew Pepper had been undertaking. It attracted a large number of visitors and was distributed internationally. In the meantime, Apple's iBooks platform was developed with the opportunity to include rich media (animations, 3-D models, video etc) within ebooks.
In revisiting the original SKYLINES publication it seems an ideal opportunity to redesign the publication and take advantage of these media possibilities. Original digital drawings have been produced in this 2014 edition, based on one of the SKYLINE images taken in Deizisau, Germany, during 2007. Alongside these 'sketches' is an animated sequence combining several views of the same SKYLINE, to explore slowly overlapping images and the 'space' between two visual 'states'.
Further volumes of SKYLINE images are in production.