Portfolio Review: Steven Pestana's Multi-Media Works Take Us on a Metaphysical Journey

"Process helps shape the content of my work. As much as it's about materials, it's also an investigation of concepts and visual language. This is my inspiration board, which has fragments and leftovers of previous projects: little experiments, material samples, and things that I just enjoy looking at. Although usually hidden in the end result, digital conceptualization is key. Digital imaging, 3D printing, CNC, laser cutting, etc., are integral to the final product."

"I like the components of a piece to speak as much to the idea as the imagery they reflect. This piece, referencing a woodcut print from an archaic Rosicrucian text, embodies various materials suggested by the original—the wood, into which the original image would have been carved; gold, suggesting the transformation illustrated in the image; and so on."

"It's been pointed out that some of my work seems to allude back to my own history as a DJ. If so, it's not a conscious decision, but it's not something I would shy away from either. Whether in a nightclub or in an art setting, immersive experience that appeals to multiple senses—and is overtly distinct from the ordinary world—has a wonderful power of awaking ideas in the mind of a viewer. These environments of aesthetic experience happen on a daily basis more often than we are aware of. It's one of the tasks of art to bring that into focus."

"A lesser known poetic form (like a sonnet or a Pastoral poem) an epyllion translates from Greek as 'tiny epic.' This piece incorporates a sequence of four hexagons, an image I often return to, cast in solid glass. With it's black, shimmering background contrasting against the more matte, almost distressed objects on its surface, this piece is a personal favorite that I hope to do more versions of down the road."

"Over the past year, I've been working with a project that I'm calling 'Metaphysics.' Along the lines of classical philosophy, Metaphysics proposes a speculative model for human perception consisting of four elements: Instinct, Time, Consciousness, and Electricity. Each has it's own unique visual language that gives me a lot of opportunities to use very different processes while still ending up with visually consistent outcomes."

"I'm always inspired by the opportunities that different sites present for making work. Often, I'll take materials unique to the location and incorporate them into the finished work. I made these steel pyramids in Michigan, home of the once-great capital of the auto industry and a formerly thriving steel industry, and set them in water to evoke elements of the iconography I've been using to represent Time in the 'Metaphysics' cosmology."

"I think it's important for work to have a presence to it, an aura. Part of that, I think, depends on visual cues suggesting that there is some kind of story to the piece, something to be decoded. Named after an arcane spirit of alchemical transmutation, traditionally represented as a bird, Azoth is laden with hints for the inquisitive viewer: a golden feather, a pile of ash, a translucent flower hovering above. I hope the air of mystery surrounding the work will invite people to spend a little more time with it."

"One central image I keep coming back to is this sort of fourth-dimensional hexagon twisting into yet another hexagon. This piece includes four of them, but there is also a fifth, hidden hexagon, engulfing the space of the piece—that of the structure as a whole. This surrounding feedback loop becomes a spatial metaphor for Consciousness itself, which, from pre-scientific days down to of-the-minute quantum mechanics, has been described (in various phrasings) as a recursive entanglement between the mind and the universe."

"I find the history of man's attempts at describing the universe through maps and diagrams to be extremely compelling. Atlas Quadrugrafia is a four-dimensional map—one that must be encountered in space to be grasped. It's composed of four separate components, each of which can only be partially understood at best without reference to the others."

"This is another personal favorite. Made of handmade, hand-dyed paper layered with gold leafing, the images are actually embedded into the paper itself, rather than drawn or glued on. For me, it creates the impression of encoded artifacts, unearthed from some enigmatic site. It charts a sequential 'progress' of the last element in my Metaphysics schema: Animus, a fifth element with a binary nature, simultaneously contingent and absolute. In the first panel, Azoth appears as a four-winged bird, lowering towards a human rib cage. A transformation occurs, represented by the disc, a divine archetype of the infinite. The last panel depicts Azoth once again ascending to the etheric plane. It sums up the system explored in these pieces as more than just a description of human cognition, but rather as an affirmation of the possibility of human freedom."