Psychic Screen Installation and Related Works
Psychic Screen began in 2021 for the exhibition The Medium is the Message at VSOP Projects in Greenport, New York, and later expanded into Psychic Screen at Cosmic Wizard, a public installation in Ridgewood, Queens, supported by the Queens Council on the Arts.
The work investigates the LED screen through handmade materials and analog light phenomena. Rather than reproducing digital technology, it constructs a material analogy to the RGB pixel matrix that underlies electronic displays. Twelve static panels enlarge and abstract RGB color structures into modular compositions whose diagonal gradients evoke the perceptual blending of digital images while remaining entirely fixed and tactile.
Each wood panel is hand-shaped with a traditional bullnose edge, emphasizing labor, materiality, and the body of the maker. Textured surfaces reject the seamless illusion of electronic displays, while ultraviolet pigments and deep green paint create the appearance of luminous backlighting. The works oscillate between handcrafted object and technological image.
My interest in the screen emerged gradually. Growing up in rural Indiana, I had limited exposure to television and digital media. Conversations with a collector involved in display engineering later sharpened my interest in screen technologies, but it was the isolation of the pandemic and the shift to remote teaching that revealed the screen as both a technological interface and a cultural mediator. The RGB pixel became, for me, the smallest programmable unit through which perception is organized.
At VSOP Projects, Psychic Screen functioned as a durational installation. As daylight shifted, ultraviolet pigments slowly emerged, transforming the paintings from textured wall objects into seemingly backlit images through a carefully balanced combination of natural and ultraviolet light.
Psychic Screen at Cosmic Wizard extended these ideas into a participatory installation. A filmed transition from incandescent to ultraviolet illumination of a single panel was looped across six storefront monitors alongside ambient sound and constructed landscape elements. Visitors wore Meta smart glasses while viewing the installation, and their recordings were immediately composited into a live wide-angle feed of the storefront. By collapsing documentation, post-production, and exhibition into a single stream, the work dissolved distinctions between viewer and participant, inside and outside, physical presence and mediated image.
The project ultimately treated mediation itself as its subject. The textured paintings anchored the installation while participants became part of its evolving representation, leaving the work to exist simultaneously as lived experience, live transmission, and the completed film Psychic Screen at Cosmic Wizard.
