Syl Arena
Syl Arena is a California-based artist / educator who seeks to create meditative experiences through his non-representational photography. In a manner that echoes the work of Bauhaus artists, Arena queries the intersections of surface, color, and shadow. Looking beyond the world of abstraction, Arena calls his photography “non-mimetic” as his photographs are intended to present new realities rather than an extraction of the scene before the lens.
Artist Statement
In the void that is our universe, darkness shines.
Nothing can be seen until light races in to push out the blackness.
Yet, light remains invisible, unseen as it flies past.
Our experience of sight is only that of perceived reflections.
Nothing is visible until light bounces off the surfaces that exist within the void.
Although the blackness appears to retreat, it remains,
waiting patiently to again fill the void.
My Constructed Voids step into the spaces of my in-between. I gaze upon these photographs and wonder if their metaphor represents spaces inside of me or if the metaphor points to our presence inside of a larger multiverse.
These Voids merge mystery with spectacle in a manner that queries expectations of the contemporary photograph. I position them as ethereal landscapes—sublime, yet otherworldly—and embrace the idea that their visual ambiguity invites interpretation. To that end, their titles (Amsu, Jern, Parna, Schen) are fabricated words intended to strip away narrative connotation and encourage meditative consideration.
Viewers often look at the Voids and mistakenly describe their non-representationality as abstract. To create an abstraction is to focus one’s view by extracting a part from a larger whole. Siskind abstracted. My photographs point to the antithesis of abstraction. They are the tripartite merger of deconstructed light, ambiguous substrates, and the vision of a contorted view camera—a concretion of a reality that does not exist until I externalize the void within.
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