Van McElwee

A series of claps, each creating a new space, echoing through anonymous worlds.

In this piece, a radical work of Dutch architecture becomes the raw material for a series of experiments with time. Born in a computer, the building jumps again into video where it can mutate freely. Here, particles becomes pixels and matter becomes light, as the structure is melted, frozen, shattered, and melted again into a new, transmissible signal. Shot at the H2O expo, Zierikzee, The Netherlands. Architect: Lars Spueybroek/NOX. "Van McElwee transports his viewers hypnotically, viscerally, imaginatively through ingenious fascinating images and sounds. Traveling through his video art, you know you’re in the hands of a dreamer and an artist." - Diane Carson, St. Louis Riverfront Times

Transfinite Loops is a reflection on the mind's tendency to create metaphysical order in the face of chaos. The piece is both a model and a metaphor for that process. Nighttime images of carnival rides appear, mesh and then dissolve into blackness, accompanied only by the sound of wind. The work unfolds like a series of thoughts, as time and space are unraveled and woven back together into intricate knots. "As gorgeous as any fireworks display, Van McElwee’s Transfinite Loops invents dazzling astral patterns." -Stephen Holden, The New York Times "Vivid video origami erupts into a blizzard…leading out of time & space" -TL Reid, Afterimage "Transfinite Loops is infectious, life-affirming and beautiful. It makes you feel good." -David Bonetti, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Imagine a fly's eye, but with each facet roaming independently through nighttime Tokyo. These multiple perspectives are woven together at brain wave frequencies, creating new patterns and new spaces. “It can be argued that McElwee’s Liquid Crystal simulates a new reality conducive to human survivability in the hypermodern age.” Robert Kohn, Afterimage “McElwee’s videos are not viewed so much as experienced. The repeated images, constantly changing, become embedded in the memory like a visual mantra.” - Rudy Zapf, Playback

A video camera floating through a real-world Chinese sky labyrinth produces nine video clips arranged by chance. In each of these units, a different part of the original cave dissolves in and out of a luminous mist, creating a new labyrinth from the old. In these frozen clouds, nothing changes but our viewpoint.

The Atomium was built for the 1958 Brussels Expo as an emblem of scientific progress. The gigantic monument represents an atomic lattice of iron crystals, magnified one hundred sixty-five billion times. In Fourth Axis, camera moves inside the actual structure cause a virtual nanoskeleton to grow, bringing the Atomium’s three-dimensional elements into a new alignment along an infinite vector.

Here the medium echoes the brain’s processing of older impressions into totally new forms, into fresh patterns to fill the empty screen of awareness. "McElwee is inviting us to revel in the tactile sensuousness of light and color itself… shimmering, fascinating," David Finkelstein, Film Threat

Waves of variation reveal the contours of impossible form, as if the process of decay were reversed, causing delicate structures to emerge from the grain of chaos. “McElwee’s work is pure image-making…quite beautiful.” - Robert Duffy, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In Buddhist architecture, the pagoda symbolizes Nirvana, the state of enlightenment. In Radio Island, this metaphor is expanded to include the entire built environment and the whole of ordinary consciousness. Mutating images of ancient and modern Japanese structures develop within a complex electronic score of radio signals and data transmission. Unusual editing techniques weave these images and sounds into a dense field of improvisation. The resulting texture becomes the raw material for totally new forms. Through a sea of noise, Radio Island charts a course from architecture to music; from the referential to the absolute.

The grain of time is imagined at close range, revealing not a straight line, but turbulence, one moment melting into another.

Imagine a filmstrip of a nocturnal American landscape. The vertical frames, as usual, represent time, but here there are horizontal frames that represent parallel universes. This piece illustrates a diagonal movement across that field of frames, so that worlds continuously melt into similar worlds, always in-between realities. If these imaginary filmstrips are cut, twisted and turned back on themselves, the image changes abruptly. In keeping with the philosophy and the mood of the piece, a cellular automata program (Wolframtones) was used to create artificial mathematical melodies that constantly shift from one strange tonal system to another.

Four L-shaped fragments of an actual hallway are tossed into space and randomly connected. These color-coded units, turning left, right, up, and down extrude an endless modular squiggle.

Apparitions, maze marchers, new world natives. Recorded in Minecraft and Aguas Calientes, Peru.

This house is under construction. Its design incorporates numerous points of view into one flowing form. The music for Aperspectival House uses a process of kaleidoscopic sound layering, as Hamilton’s parallel to the additive textures found in the video. All the original sounds are short recordings of construction sounds – hammering and sawing – which are transformed into somewhat coherent pitches and rhythms. TH “Where today we seem to discern only shrieks and dissonance, tomorrow we will find a new tone, a new form, a new perception.” Jean Gebser

A procession branches into clouds of variation; one as many, many as one. The sound was created from the voices of Beijing schoolgirls reciting prose in unison. "A fascinating visual study…strikingly beautiful." David Finkelstein, Film Threat

Three garden paths twist and turn through a labyrinth of time. The earth orbits the sun as a camera orbits the gardens. Six years are cut and folded as a playful edit-form spins its web. "Ultimately, Mcelwee is tracking the effect of time on nature as he moves from summer to winter and back again. Editing is the key here to this complex origami project (think of each edit as a crease)." -Ann-Sargent Wooster, artist, writer

Real-world objects are turned inside-out, imploding into unnatural spaces, becoming a single substance of endless forms.

A dream of coming and going, of a world deep in time.

Fragile membranes, porous boundaries, (dis)connective tissue, ethereal plumbing.

The screen is slit into colors. Through this moves a pattern that is constantly warped by waves. Another space opens up; level upon level of form is revealed. Clusters of voices repeat themselves. Alternating percussion and sharp edits counerpoint the auiovisual flow.