Artist Feature: Cody Healey-Conelly
...exceptionally rich in piles of trash.
From the Artist:
The images in Prelude/Vestige were all shot during a month long residency in Iceland. The majority of the month was spent on the remote island of Hrisey, with a population of about 130 people. In the final four days of the residency program, my girlfriend and I drove west from Reykjavik along the Ring Road. The icebergs were all shot at Jokulsarlon lake, a brackish lagoon at the base of a glacier.
Prelude/Vestige is a reflection on the destruction of the environment through human actions, particularly by harvesting natural resources for technology. The series is comprised of two distinct groups of images, Prelude and Vestige. Prelude documents icebergs in the Jokulsarlon, Iceland while Vestige consists of brightly colored abstract shapes derived from corrupting the image data from the Prelude photos. Icebergs have become a visual symbol of climate change, an object that exists in the present but very well be extinct in the future. By using the same photos to create both sides of the work, the images are linked in a way that suggests a before and after relationship. The simple, numbered titles of the work allude to the scientific nature of the work, positioning the photos as a documentation of the break down of the natural and technological worlds, monuments of the past and near future.
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The natural images in Un/Natural were all shot during the same visit to Iceland, albeit in a more diverse set of locations than the Prelude/Vestige series. In particular, many of the images were shot on Vestmannaeyjar Island, a volcanic island off the southern coast of Iceland. The unnatural images were all shot in industrial areas of New York City. In particular, the neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn (a Superfund site) proved to be exceptionally rich in piles of trash and oil slicks.
Un/Natural is a series that takes images from two seemingly incongruous worlds, those of nature and those of industry, and melds them into a single image. An iceberg gradually shifts into a pile of scrap metal as the eye travels across the frame of the image. When seen together these dissimilar images create a narrative showing the path from natural resources to the synthetic lives we have built around us. A collision takes place between the two environments, the images begin to stutter and breakdown, glitches are brought to the forefront, colors shift, and data is corrupted, symbolizing both the breakdown of the natural and human made worlds which increasingly seems impossible to avoid.
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Cody Healey-Conelly is a Brooklyn based multimedia artist primarily working with photography and video. He received his BA in New Media from Emerson College in 2005 and has spent the subsequent years balancing work, art, and travel. Thematically, his work deals with politics, technology, environmental issues, and an uncertain future.