False Pretenses

In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.

A rhythmic study of materiality and melancholy in human form.

Charmed Particles is a physics term... it describes the point at which energy becomes matter, intangible ‘nothing’ becoming, somehow, ‘something.’ What lies at the heart of each atom is nothing... the beast at the heart of the labyrinth... and from that nothing comes the something we call the world. Being emanates from nothing, and vice versa. Oldest question in the world: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Ghost pictures from the "other" world, which is this world. The ghost is in love, at work, at play with bright companions. Flutter of phantoms, trick of light, sleight of the eye. A comedy of mirrors. Love advice from the grave... remember you must die.

"Intuitive conjuring and orchestration of retinal phantoms, refined by abstraction into music for light and mind. Light, both wave and particle, alive and moving, making shadow and, therefore, time."

“Cinema isn’t materials…it is refined, imaginative seeing…darkness made visible…[it] existed long before modern devices, since the first opening of the first animal eyelid…scene one, take one.... We invent the world as we are seeing it. Anything can happen” (Andrew Noren)

Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window is savored and shattered and seen for what it is.

“Aberration of starlight: the apparent displacement of a star resulting from Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun. It depends on the ratio of Earth’s orbital speed to the speed of light and Earth’s direction of motion and thus provides confirmation that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the reverse.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia Noren’s last major work is a visual symphony of astonishing variations on light, shadow, time, and spatial illusion. This is what Noren, quoting Lao-Tsu, called “practicing eternity” and “what the light was like.” According to Noren, “working electronically provides a kind of non-mechanical fluidity, a sense of floating, if you will. For me the digital apparatus is like a great visual piano of wonderful sophistication.”