Rob Swainston: A formal analysis

I was able to visit  Rob Swainston's show, "We thought they thought what we thought, but they didn't", and it was compelling to say the least.  This was a part of University Galleries in Normal, Illinois.  What a quaint town.  I would like to focus my attention towards a grouping of images on one of the gallery walls.  These images were green, red and blue.  All of the different colored images all had the color black in common.  The combination of green, red, and blue is significant because it is an additive color model in which these colors mixed are able to create a wide array of colors.  These pieces have an eerie and captivating essence to them.  They are fairly large across one of the larger gallery walls and they simply consume you and demand your attention. There are a total of four on this wall.  Two of them remind me of an aerial landscape viewpoint.  Something out of a militaristic video of scanning with thermal vision to find out the enemy.  But you don’t know the enemy and you don’t know why or what you are looking for.  It’s not confusion, it’s just not declarative.  The other two are similar but instead of an aerial view it is a view from below and far away.  Possibly old ruins of some sort.  Something you might see inside a Tomb Raider game.  You can scan through these prints over and over and yet when you come back to them you can see something different.  It gives you a very vague storyline that gives you a healthy number of outcomes and leaves it to you to put it together.  There seems like there are several historic references but there is nothing solid to make you sure of yourself.  This is refreshing because the outcome is different depending on the viewer and their own perspective.  The technique behind the construction of these prints supplements its content as well.  These are all made from the tradition of woodcuts, a method for printmaking.  Although it is the oldest method of printmaking this is a very contemporary take on achieving a finished result.  All of the woodblocks were cut out using a CNC machine.  This is putting a twist on tradition and using these ambiguous prints to project forward and create an experience all of their own.  With so much information thanks to the CNC machine, it gives us so many possibilities to let our minds wander and create a narrative to go with them.  Even the images that are the same but just composed with different colors have their own separate story to tell.