Statement

As an artist with a background in physics, I am interested in how we use data gathered from our surroundings as a means to comprehend our world. I believe that scientific methods tend to mirror our thought patterns at large, which makes science a workshop not only for discovering nature’s secrets but also for probing our relationship to knowledge itself.

I extend this spirit of sense-making to my artistic practice, where I apply an exploratory approach to my visual materials, creating handmade objects that are rich in information. I work with photographs and digital compositions that are printed on paper, then embellished with paintings and drawings, and ultimately folded into geometric patterns. Often, I use images of my finished pieces as source material for later work. With this recursive process, I generate sequences of image-based sculptures whose complex surfaces bear the accumulated history of their making.

In these objects, every visual layer, including the folds in a print, is a lens for interpreting the layers below it. My work diagrams the way we look at reality and how we process and absorb new information, leading to changes in our beliefs that are usually incremental, but that can also be radical, like when we juxtapose art with science and allow each one to illuminate the other.

Biography

Werner Sun is a visual artist with a background in physics, who lives and works in Ithaca, NY. He uses repetitive manual processes to slowly transform digital images into sculptural objects that evoke the gradual accumulation of knowledge in science. Werner’s work has been featured at Garrison Art Center, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Aon (New York, NY), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and the Islip Art Museum. He has been commissioned to create kinetic sculptures for Cornell University’s Mann Library and the Cornell Botanic Gardens. His essays and images have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Interalia Magazine, and Stone Canoe. He is the 2019 recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award from the CUE Art Foundation, and a 2017 recipient of a Strategic Opportunity Stipend from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, NY. Werner’s work has been described as “stimulating and altogether engrossing,” (Ithaca Times), serving as “a reminder that art can be a reflection of the intricacies of physics, and that both belong to the universe at large” (Hyperallergic).