VIN GRABILL

Painting, Visual / Media

The world and how we perceive it is constantly moving, always in flux, transitioning from one moment of the flow to another. In my painting, I try to balance the organic and unpredictable natural world with the human urge to identify and impose some kind of order. My paintings present this counterpoint of form/chaos via window structures - two sets of often unrelated imagery are juxtaposed together in these figure/ground scenarios. I also work in time-based media, and I refer to my video art work as "painting in time", due to it's focus on rhythmic editing and the visualization of musical ideas.

About the Artist

I received a B.A. degree in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 1971 and a Master of Science in Visual Studies degree from the M.I.T. Center For Advanced Visual Studies in 1981. After teaching Video Art at the Massachusetts College of Art from 1984-1988, I joined the faculty of the UMBC Department of Visual Arts in 1988 where I continued to teach Video Art until I retired in 2020. I served as Graduate Program Director of the Imaging and Digital Art MFA program from 2001-2007 and as Chairperson of the department from 2008-2015.

VIN GRABILL website My Baker Artist site for video art VIN GRABILL website My Flickr site for painting and sculpture

Artist's Statement

This group of paintings demonstrate my interest in utilizing grid structures to imagine multi-layered scenarios. In addition to the foundational window structures common to each painting, I rely on contrasting color value clusters to ensure a degree of figure/ground give and take. With four of these paintings (“Reach”, “Idea”, “Ayers Rock Struck By A Blue Meteor”, and “Infusion”), I’m initiating different kinds of connecting elements that link together various parts of the spatial “realities” depicted in each painting. In the remaining two paintings (“Convergence” and “Determining Intersections”), I don’t introduce connecting links, but parts of the boundaries between some of the grid structures break down, resulting in a different kind of flow between the windowed scenarios.

Featured Work

Photos

I begin with two separate images created by shooting TV images through a large lens. I then juxtapose these image sets into a grid structure utilizing Photoshop. Finally, I apply acrylic paint to enhance the relationship between the two image layers.

This painting continues my interest in window structures and figure ground relationships.

Videos

11 Time Paintings

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I think of my video art as painting in time. “11 Time Paintings” presents a series of short visual music sketches produced utilizing a range of rhythmic editing techniques. The audio always originates with the original ambient sound recorded at the time the video was shot. My intent is to create a visceral effect, with a distinct sound/image “brushstroke” occurring with each edit - no additional soundtracks are added. While abstract in a musical sense, vestiges of the locations where I shot my source footage remain, revealing references to Madrid traffic, Times Square, a jungle in Costa Rica, and other sites.

Medium: HD video

Year: 2019

Details: 6:24 minutes
Sky Buy

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“Sky Buy” is an experimental video conceived as a dream collage. My intent was to arrange a set of images with all the logic and shifting pacing of a dreamscape. In the principal scenes, various artifacts of TV media are subjected to a forceful purifying water barrage. I collaborated with computer animator Francisco Olivares to create a waterspout sequence designed to overwhelm a series of abstracted scenes drawn from commercial media. A second animated water sequence depicts the flooding of the physical detritus of our media infrastructure. Additional footage includes night driving, two plazas in Madrid, an ocean buoy, driving in the rain, and a Klezmer band. Elliott Grabill provided principal sound/music sequences.

Medium: HD video

Year: 2013

Details: 2:42 minutes