Eric Standley

Everything is a subspace of something else. Our physical bodies are subspaces of our consciousness. Memories are subspaces of the future. Fear, desire, and purpose are subspaces of love. These are not simply smaller spaces that fit inside larger ones. They are continuous positions of an irreducible whole that is in a constant state of becoming.

The three stations of the Continuum installation contain impressions of acceptance, irreducibility, and resilience. Light moves from right to left in each arch while shifting through color temperatures from sunrise, high noon, and sunset, over a thirty-minute period.

Memories are deceptive. By the time you read these words, I will not be the same person I was when I wrote them. When you leave this website and hopefully see these artworks in person one day, of which I highly recommend, your memory will be challenged by witnessing them in your own accumulating moments of discovery. When you get to that point, I have some advice: 1. Eat a meal first so that you are not hungry. 2. Allow your heartrate to elevate before you see them with maybe some light exercise, and 3. Stop remembering.

A memory is like a word. For a verb, you can type it and read it, or you can act it out. The first is a static semiotic substitute for the lived experience. The second participates in the quantum existence we are irreducibly a part of. Irreducible, and to a degree all of my artwork, is the outcome of questioning my faith, fortitude, and awareness in forward-facing moments while creating. Consciousness seeks boundlessness.

A good friend of mine lost his 21 year old son to a tragic incident involving LSD. The void Devlin left in our lives pulled us all closer, while at the same time marking our relationships with the trauma of his absence. The reconciliation of love and loss is not a secular process. There is an intrinsic human impulse to contemplate faith and doubt when confronting mortality.

I have a habitual attraction with filling the empty spaces of my compositions with details. I don’t know if absences are fearfully incomplete to me or if I have a futile need to see evidence of the infinite. I used the connection between these thoughts and Devlin’s death to realize this artifact.

Each time I exhibit this project, I revisit the wall color and painted design that frames the work. It has been exhibited three times since its first showing in the fall of 2023, and would like to see it change again in the future.

Elaborate.

Oppose.

Abandon.

I chose one of these prompts each week for a year to create the Drift series. The rules were to create a layered paper composition within a week’s time for one year and use one of the three prompts to inform how each artwork would evolve from the previous. The routine was a performance enacting a Darwinian model of variety and natural selection.

The series constitutes a species. The paper, cutting technique, shape, size, frame and time restrictions were set genetic traits during the process. My interpretation of the prompts were environmental influences that relied on my aesthetic judgements and mood week to week. Some compositions were duplicated more than once with slight changes while others were not finished in time and were not included in the series.

We exchange tolerances based on one another’s abilities to comprehend and relate to what we perceive. Witnessing a tolerance that is outside our current perception either opens a path to growth or is completely unrecognizable. Maybe we are all motivated from a subconscious fear of existential loneliness – of truly not being understood by any other living thing – making us willing to exchange our tolerances freely. There is always more to what is seen, said and perceived, limited by the unconscious agreement of a tolerance. Expanding consciousness is the cognitive act of going beyond that agreement and having the courage to update and shift.

For this commission I pushed the dynamic focus of exterior and interior detail so that there would seemingly always be something new to see depending on the light, angle of view, or attention of the viewer. The full interior dome is visible by looking down into the mirror in order to look up into the details within. The work is illuminated from the center and below and can be rotated to investigate.

Joy Rosenthal was a friend and colleague of mine at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The last conversation I had with her was about her heart condition, and that she had an unknown but limited amount of time before her heart would fail. She taught her classes as if nothing was wrong, continued photographic work with her daughter Esther, and attended meetings to help her son David, a senior in high school, navigate his college applications for fall of 2024. She died suddenly at the age of 57 in her home on November 7th, 2023.

The essence of our universe is expansion. As the universe expands, so does our consciousness, awareness, and possibilities. Our minds and bodies are designed to allow our spirits to witness time, space, and other beings for a tiny moment during this expansion. Presence is an illusion created by memories. When our bodies and minds cease, our spirits become ungrounded.

Omnia is a commission that took over 2 years to complete, containing over 2000 layers of paper, hundreds of glass headed pins and a wake of experimental artworks that informed the techniques required to bring it to fruition. The gravity of this archetype in concept and form was so pronounced that for most of the building process I simply had to listen to it and do as it asked. I was constantly reminded of this by being yanked back to its will if I applied too much determination or deviation from what should have been perfectly clear had I been listening. I need that feeling of clarity again in all of my work moving forward. This project has made me aware of the archeological mindset of preservation as a counterweight to determination, and I cannot see my process any other way at the moment.

The original proposal was titled “Elements” which was replaced with “Everything is Everything” after reading about quintessence and theories of the expansion of the universe. Omnia became shorthand in my drawings for Everything is Everything which was consecrated as its official name by the owner in fall of 2020.

The framework of Verum Object 4 and 3 are identical and were built in the summer of 2020. The paper layers and center were drawn and assembled in January and February 2021 after Omnia was completed and installed at Dinner Gallery in NY. The evolution of dimensionality with paper progressed rapidly at this time, opening many “what if” questions about physicality and fragility.

Creating Verum Objects began as an act of detoxification. Building these fragile artifacts provided me with a way to experience the purity of undeniable truth as physical objects. Verum Object 1 was most influenced by physical distancing and isolation while at the same time questioning the form and function of the frames of previous work. Sharing the vulnerability of my work has become essential. Trust is sometimes hard to give freely, but always feels great to receive.

Empirical truth is not enough for humanity. The paradox of Ramon Llull is his bridging of eastern and western cultures and religions in the 13th and 14th century. While I do not agree with his motivations to spread Christianity into the Middle East during his lifetime, I do find it interesting that he wrote admiringly about the strength and devotion of Islamic, Muslim faith. Author of Ars Magna, a mathematically logical system to discover truth, I like to think he brought awareness to the true necessity and beauty of all faiths across humanity.

I had just taken on a long term commission (The Currency of Tolerances) that explored the perception and exchange of tolerances. This line of conceptual development slipped very easily into lateral thinking and entertaining the opposites of what this commission would be. Typically nothing goes unquestioned in my process, but in this case my contrarian nature put a series of fixated questions out in front of the practical goals of the actual commission, and pointed me to something else. I felt certain that this “otherness” had to be made before I could move forward. The leading protagonists were gravity and symmetry: How would the absence of gravity change this form? How would a self-similar object that had a soft relationship to fractal geometry exist in a weightless environment?

Ludolph van Ceulen was a 16th century mathematician who calculated 𝜋 to 35 decimals. The number was engraved on his tombstone after his death in 1610. I did not use 𝜋 as a calculation in this piece, but named the work after Ceulen in relation to our shared obsessive behavior. I often miss the obvious and overthink things on a daily basis, which is only amplified in my artwork.

Cassini’s Dream was realized from notes and sketches I created in 2018 based on the Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn. Several images of Saturn’s hexagonal south pole specifically fascinated me, spearheading this project and several compositions that were never completed. The title is double-edged for me, could be a dream of the spacecraft / machine before plummeting into the planet, or a fictitious realized dream of the mathematician Giovanni Cassini to witness Cassini’s Division and the rings of Saturn in person.  

Embracing fragility has liberated my work from the traditional frame, and has opened new frontiers of physical space for me to explore. I have been dreaming about my work occupying space as a tangible artifact unto itself, and shedding the final remains of “picture” from the equation. This might sound like modernism, but in my mind it was a move to clear the way for essentialism.

The essence of the universe is it’s constant expansion. As the universe expands, so does consciousness. Impossibilities are horizons that become possibilities and eventually realities, only to reveal new impossibilities that will become possibilities and realities, over and over as the universe accelerates outward. We live in an age of optimism that constantly grows more complex, presenting infinitely new possibilities without stopping or slowing down. In this age of optimism, beauty blossoms from discovery.

I began applying phi to the drawing processes of Kismet and Phidala, not as a strict function, but as a guide to certain compositional decisions. The fanned central area here in Phidala was drawn as if on a spherical surface, forcing objects to diminish by 1.618 laterally and vertically. Because of this I had to position many elements by eye and abandoned clean mathematical rotations- yes, it has bilateral symmetry, but beyond that there are odd irregularities that were arrived at in a nexus of “phi and eye”. 

An archetype can exist in the present and simultaneously mark all times, past and future.

Building Kismet was like carefully freeing an object from an archaeological site. There were combined moments that harmonized creating and discovering during the drawing process. The title was arrived at during the process for this very reason. I could enter a flow state of process quite easily, which also might attend to its fractal-like appearance. I considered phi at the beginning of the work, but did not employ the number as literally as I did for Phidala or Woe to the Vanquished.

This work was based on specific elements of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mocking Bird. The character Mrs. Dubose was addicted to morphine. She vowed to rid her addiction of the drug in order to die a free woman. Atticus Finch had Jem read to Mrs. Dubose seemingly as a punishment, but truly it was a lesson about liberty and purpose. Atticus Finch explains this to Jem:

“She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe . . . I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”

Atticus and Mrs. Dubose were the same in that they denounced external pressures to sway them from their principles and purpose. Their freedoms were achieved through courage and discipline. This is the first time I really considered essentialism – the opposite of existentialism. I think I cannot understand a thought unless I understand the negative space in which it exists. From the vantage point of opposition or even metaphor I can see a thing but I am blind looking at it straight on. Purpose for me is equal to the relationship between gravity and water. The influence of purpose provides essential form to my participation in the world. 

Life is symbiotic in nature, and astoundingly beautiful in its form, tenacity and perseverance. The unyielding will to live and coexist deserves commemoration. I took liberties in interpreting Ovid’s Daphne after her metamorphosis. It is her salvation I want to highlight; her triumph in preserving her existence equally with her values. The tenacity to live as one chooses while circumventing the animalistic gravity of fear and desire in this myth is of great significance. Daphne traded her existence as a fugitive filled with fear and repulsion for a root-bound life of freedom and harmony with the world.

Daphne’s legendary beauty blossoms in her resulting sanctity after her metamorphosis. Overcoming the enchantments of fear and desire set by Eros identifies compassion as the ultimate capability of humanity. Compassion transcends instinctual behaviors and lifts preservation of life outside the individual. All of life seeks survival and continuation. Realizing the necessity of the symbiotic nature of our existence – of our entire reality – requires the sophisticated adaptation of compassion.

The Islamic and Persian motifs I recently witnessed have greatly influenced me, and decided I should act with a combination of study and intuition for this piece. Arch 6 is an archetype that poured through me during its production. The arrangements came with complete familiarity, and understood whole sections of the composition in my head at one time before I could get it sorted out in my sketchbook. At 184 layers, the piece has many spaces to discover, and changes dramatically when viewed from different angles and lighting.

This work is a part of the Orionis series created for the Islamic Arts Festival in Sharjah, UAE. The original plan was to create an installation with these three works using very low lighting levels in a closed space. Either/Or Delta Orionis occupies 171 layers of paper and has several rooms that are tucked behind floating areas of the work.  

Delta, Epsilon and Zeta Orionis were the early stellar designations given to the stars commonly known as Orion’s Belt. The Orionis series is my third project that is based on the greek mythology – specifically the version where Orion is killed by a common scorpion sent by Gaia. I prefer this version of the mythology, where a small, seemingly insignificant creature can overthrow raw strength and scale. I am a romantic I guess, and connect to the idea that the conscious will of the most finite detail has bearing on the whole.

When I travel or visit galleries and museums, I am attracted to artifacts and structures that are constructed from reverence and obsession; beacons of when faith extends human capabilities to extraordinary levels. I find myself searching for evidence of impossibilities surpassed. My curiosity is trumped by my constant need to create and, admittedly, to control. 

The Greek Mythological twins Castor and Polydeuces were horsemen and tamers of stormy seas to aid shipwrecked men. Their relationship to one another was of unyielding affection, mutual respect and constant, democratic consultation. When Castor was killed, Polydeuces asked if he could sacrifice half of his own immortality and give it to Castor in order to bring him out of Hades. Zeus granted his son’s wish and divided Polydeuces’s immortality with Castor, enabling them to alternate their days on Olympus among the gods and Hades as deceased mortals.

The mythology echo’s my attraction to paradoxes. Truth for me is replaced by a continuous dependency on eternally opposing either/or logic. I imagine in the context of this myth that Polydeuces is able to see Castor in those moments where each passes from Olympus and Hades; a precious cross-road that reassures each brother that they do indeed continue on, though not together in the same world.

Dioscuri occupies 121 sheets of paper, including a print of a photo of the Atlantic ocean I took in Marblehead, MA.

I witness the sublime whenever I am out in the Ipswich Bay of Massachusetts. As a child I would stare out at the horizon for hours while my dad was fishing. There is beauty in this place- the simple division of ocean and sky met with the complexity of space, a boat as a tiny point floating over land over one hundred feet below, miles of sky above, a mile back to land to the west and even more to east. But the real motivation for this artwork is a bigger story.

It was my Dad’s love and intelligence that gave me a life-defining gift at a specific time in my childhood, floating on a boat in this place. For those Ipswich water people, we were out about halfway to Jeffery’s Ledge at a spot where, back in the day you could anchor and always catch Cod. It was glassy calm at the time, sunny, and cool, and hypnotically quiet. I was eight I think. Looking out to the east, I had a concluding thought:

“Dad, the horizon is the straightest line there is, right?

My dad is literally a genius, and was a leading engineer working on steam turbines for ships at GE in Lynn. Growing up, he always had answers that were way more than confirmations, starting with a preemptive signal like well, actually, or almost- you see, and ..what’s really neat is..”. This meant if you were game, we were heading into an enthusiastic exchange of discovery that would conclude with some kind of historical or philosophical revelation.

“Well, if you measured the horizon for straightness with accurate instruments, you will find the curvature of the earth. If you keep on measuring something, nothing is perfect.”

This last part bothered me. With my 3 years of public school education that gave me nothing but perfect answers, I had an argument.

“What about the tools to measure with? If they can see what’s off about a line, then they must be perfect.” Yup – nailed it!

“Actually, in engineering we use tolerances where a fine degree of accuracy is needed, but in theory, you could measure something forever. Its like this for everything we make, like a car or a boat, but also for everything we see, like the sky, the water, the stars… nothing is actually perfect, it is exactly what it is at any give moment- and that can change depending on who is looking.”

After about a solid five minutes of silence while I processed this new and extremely disturbing thought at the time, I started crying and could not be consoled. I think he talked the whole way back toward land and up the Ipswich river, but I did not hear a thing. It was like the entire world was suddenly flung into doubt.

My Dad gave me the paradox of the infinite, and throughout my childhood I applied it to just about everything. It fit nicely with sports, music, and art, where my own actions could aim for accuracy, but was way more fun and interesting when something was done or created as if it never existed before, or would be impossible to duplicate. It did not match up well with many people, like being sarcastic at the wrong time, or rudely dropping out of useless arguments when it seemed like someone only saw things as right or wrong.

And then there was religion and my young Catholic faith. By about twelve or so when I was confirmed, the idea of God was replaced with the idea of infinity, and church, catechism, and the sacraments fell into place as tolerances. It took me a while to see the ethical and moral beauty faith can provide after digging into philosophy and art history in college. Kierkegaard and Campbell really helped me reconcile my faith as a personal and artistic endeavor, allowing me to understand my own ethical values as transient tolerances and ultimately idealistic paths, as in Ithica.

Ironically, this was one of the last representational paintings I made before fully embracing non-objectivity and aiming my studio processes toward novelty and discovery.

The central composition is cut from 98 separate sheets of paper. The horizon seascape was created from a digital photo of the Ipswich Bay of Massachusetts, printed and painted on canvas with oil and acrylic.

My work is inspired by geometry from Gothic and Islamic architectural ornamentation in an attempt to capture a reverence for the infinite. I am interested in the conceptual migration from the permanence and massiveness of stone to the fragility and intimacy of paper.

Agawam was the 17th century name for the settlement of Ipswich Massachusetts. The name comes from one of the the Native-American tribes that lived on the northeast coast. My experiences growing up in Ipswich are rooted in the land, ocean and seasons as strongly as the people from my childhood. I remember as a teenager trying to get lost; not just to be alone, but to be free to employ all of my wits toward survival and self-reliance. I spent whole summer days in the marshes along Fox Creek, across the bay to Sandy Point, or the dunes of Cranes Beach without seeing another person, or in some cases without witnessing any evidence of contemporary civilization. I could convince myself that I somehow slipped back in time and was walking the on the same land, only 200 years earlier. This type of isolation deeply impacted me and changed me every time. From my perspective a consistency remained in the spaces I walked, and outside of my being. 

Personal mythology is woven into my memories of Ipswich that I cannot quite sort out in a linear way with words, save one: majestic. There is a shifting paradoxical pattern I tried to work with in the Agawam and Ithica compositions that I am sure I will visit again down the road. 

A circular configuration of nine has a more complex mathematical and visual arrangement. Historically this is not a common pattern, possibly because it is difficult to align or support while constructing. Even with the aid of my computer I had to create “ghost objects” in order to draw multiple patterns of nine on a radius.

All the 8" x 10" compositions I produce are studies for larger works. I can pre-visualize in a wholistic sense, but some of the details need to be created and seen. Sometimes my ideas just do not work- visually or structurally. This is my platform for risk and investigation.  Some are repeated in different colors, or have slight variations to the layers, while others are one-off compositions. The Circle and Tetragon Drawings also include explorations without a specific artwork in mind- which often inspires a more ambitious project.  

These eight by ten drawings are cut studies for larger works and investigations of events within compositions.

These drawings are studies for larger compositions including Woe to the Vanquished and Kismet. Employing gold leaf adds to my list of challenges, but sits beautifully with the paper. I learned how to gild from artist Panos Ghikos in Boston back when I was studying painting. 23k gold seems to have a light-source of its own which works well behind the deepest layers and detailed cuts.