At key points throughout Paul Thomas Anderson's recent movie, Punch Drunk Love, the screen dissolves into hypnotic sequences of slowly morphing swirls of colour: a poignant metaphysical rendition of the mood and emotional state of Adam Sandler's lead protagonist across the narrative. For American artist, Jeremy Blake, the creator of these mesmerising vignettes, the feature film stands as a natural extension of his artistic project: combining traditional and commercial media with technological tenacity to shift our perceptual understanding of conventional paradigms associated with film, photography, digital design, animation, and ultimately, of art itself.

Jeremy Blake began his career as a painter, studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and it was only after moving to California to attend the MFA program at the California Institute of Arts in 1993, that his focus shifted towards experimental film and video. "I was fascinated with film's ability to tell a story over time," Blake explains. "I thought that would be a new and interesting route for abstraction, trying to bring to film the 2-D logic of painting." Blake's tact was to merge the spatial logic of drawing and the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionist and colour-field painting, with motion and sound to create an all encompassing, time-based experience. These computer-generated animations have much in common with traditional media, after all, like painting, digital art is done on a flat rectangular tablet that accommodates point-by-point manipulation and carefully controlled displays of line, form and colour. From this basic premise, Blake collages in layers of free-floating imagery. Sometimes scanning in his own ink drawings and watercolours, sometimes drawing on images from popular culture, architectonic form or urban myth to formulate a compelling amalgamation of complex visual rhythms and esoteric narrative.

Blake first came to attention with his critically acclaimed video projection, Guccinam, which was included in the groundbreaking digital art exhibition, 010101 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. Here, Blake depicted a seamless progression of translucent layers of architectural and abstract imagery. Doors and curtains open to reveal a theatre of dreamlike architectural spaces interspersed with trace images drawn from consumer culture and faux-military camouflage patterns. For all their whimsical beauty, these scenes are held together by a rigorous structural integrity: grids hold the space in place, and forms are balanced and counter-balanced across the picture plane.

Blake continues to extend the narrative and mythological element of his work with, "1906" (2003), the most recent episode from an ongoing trilogy that interprets the bizarre story of Sarah Winchester, the widow of the founder of the Winchester rifle company in San Jose, California. Following the premature death of her husband and child in the late 1800s, she became obsessed that the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester guns were haunting her home. This lead her to a thirty-eight-year long building project to accommodate these spirits, incorporating false stairways to nowhere, windows built into floors, doors that opened up several stories above ground and long corridors for the un-dead to roam. As with the first part of the series, titled, Winchester (2002), Blake has overlaid 16mm shots of old photographs of the house with hundreds of sumptuously coloured ink drawings, and intricate frame by frame digital retouching, alluding to the presence of the supernatural entities within, and the fearful chambers of Sarah Winchester's mind. Shadowy forms and luminescent coloured mists configure into intricate multi-layered Rorschach type shapes that bleed like gunshot wounds across the surface and dissolve across flat and deep space. As a move on from Winchester, the flow of images tends to play more to the peripheral architectural details of the house. A ghostly trail of coloured tendrils creeps out of the mouth of a door handle, a chandelier is lit, mysteriously, by an ethereal blue/green light, and shafts of sunlight shining through a skylight become transformed into an ominous creeping haze.

While on the one hand, these works suggest one woman's descent into madness, Blake explains that it is also his intention, "to gently confront the way in which American culture grieves and mythologizes violence". Indeed, for Blake the Winchester house stands as a testament to American identity, be it through the quintessential Protestant work ethic, where earthly and spiritual reward should be received for continued hard work, or in the endless pursuit of a better life: in this case, one free from the anxiety and guilt from the past. This pursuit of the American dream lies at the heart of Jeremy Blake's artworks. Like Sarah Winchester's ever-evolving house, Blake sees endless possibilities in the visual interpretation of experience.

This has led him to a sustained interest into expanding the field of art into the broader cultural arena. As well as his recent project with Paul Thomas Anderson, he has also collaborated with the musician, Beck on the cover and insert for his 2002 CD, Sea Change. Blake sees much common ground across these disciplines, "we are all interested in combining new and old media in surprising ways", he explains, "rifling through the files of history, and trying to find something that matches how we feel."

Kate Zamet
March 2003