Time and Layers and Stencils - StenLex

 I'm fascinated by time. 
I'm one of those people who find it very easy to drift off into reverie, to distance myself from the cares and worries of the modern world and sink into that giant hole of contemplation that can either swallow you up and confuse you or lead you somewhere unexpected, enlightening, challenging or exciting. 


As you'd no doubt find, if you tried, trying to define time is extremely complicated. 
We don't usually think about it as the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades (although i have seen very few of them yet) pass us by, yet it affects us so much. Different times involve different spaces, places or situations, frames of mind, states of being... We are chemically different at every single moment. 


Time can be linear (the way most of us understand it - coming from a Newtonian, Judeo-Christian influenced modernity), it may be unreal, or as Kant would have it 'an abstract dimension'; It is not a thing, event or container through which things can flow and be measured, but an intellectual structure. 


Most of us experience time in a linear manner. We look back into the past and forward to the future. Moments in time accumulate,  metaphorically it could resemble a tutu or a stack of paper, one moment on top of the other like layers, and the top most layer is now. 


For this reason, work such as these poster/canvases by StenLex (Sten and Lex), really interest me. The multi-layered pieces combine traditional and modern methods and styles and illustrates the time and effort put into them. It goes without saying that they look amazing! 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/-sten-/

Illusive and intricate but with a visible, obvious subject, at first I thought that they had to be computer generated. The video and further information however illustrates otherwise. Large format street art - there is nothing overly technological about these. It's time consuming, highly technical work - cutting strips out one by one with a scalpel to create a stencil, lifting up the final delicate frame and somehow managing to place it over a canvas without twisting, bending or breaking it... it'd probably drive me insane! The work is then painted over entirely and then the strips are carefully peeled away to reveal the final image. 
The stencil is left on, curling at the edges, illustrating the time and effort of the artist, the stages of the artwork's growth all left intact. Historic photographs reincarnated, an old method, a new style. Time, narrative, experience, history, material and effort are combined in an art form that can be applied anywhere.


This is how it's done.

STEN LEX stencil poster from STEN on Vimeo.