Threshold

Stan Narten collects images from a variety of references across a wide range of cultural touchpoints: popular culture, classical painting, ruins photography, obscure album art, fantasy illustration. In his recent work he turns his gaze on interior design, those heavily staged magazine tableaus where the wealthy show off their exquisite taste in design, architecture, and art.

Like a modern-day Kunstammer, these rooms offer a rich starting point. They combine contemporary artwork, vintage furniture, stacks of books, flower arrangements, strangely patterned rugs, oddball chandeliers, and other disparate visual forms, ready and waiting to be transformed and intertwined, scrambled and rebuilt into psychedelic, post-apocalyptic compositions.

The wealthy have always used monumental expenditures—palaces, pyramids, the patronage and collecting of art—as bids toward immortality and as talismans to ward off death. Each featured home in Architectural Digest reflects its own tragic Ozymandias. But ever-encroaching entropy eventually brings chaos and decay to even the most tastefully planned and lavish collections.

Narten conjures up the entropy that has been hidden from sight in these carefully composed chambers. The source imagery is digitally digested, purged, then built back as if from its own crumbled pieces. It’s a process that involves cutting up images, layering them in multiples, filtering and manipulating in Photoshop, then reinterpreting the composition by hand in oils. Interlaced with disparate elements from various sources, from urban decay to classical still life, the painting becomes a completely new and mysterious collage of familiar forms, never quite congealing into a stable image.

The resulting work offers no clear-cut commentary on any particular theme, but an exploration of the means by which meaning is created through perception. It calls attention to that undecided moment before form and meaning cohere, the instant before subconscious biases, language, and memory defines the space we perceive around us.

The act of cutting up and putting back again is particularly suited for encouraging the perceiving human agent to fill in the gaps of meaning. The cut-up technique has a long tradition of uncovering hidden true, hidden meaning; like many games of chance, it is considered a form of divination. “When you cut into the present,” William S. Burroughs, one of its champions, said, “the future leaks out.”

On canvas, this leaked future appears as chaos and flames, or harmony and flowers, a dropped mask, slips in the seams of reality, or even, as software increasingly eats the world, a glitch in the matrix. Organic material decays; digital material glitches. A corrupted file may appear to be a mishap, but entropy breaks everything down.

Until that moment of perception within the human mind, images and the space around us remain—like Schrödinger’s cat—unresolved, fragments of light caught in the moment of meaning being formed out of a shapeless mass of photons. As technology’s inevitable decay infects and corrupts our reality with its own machine-generated false mirror, that moment of human perception Narten captures becomes a defiant act against the machines’ nightmare dystopian future.

-Stephen Hoban 2025

The show opens on January 16 and will run till February 27, 2025.