Statement

As an artist with a background in physics, I am interested in how we use data gathered from our surroundings as tools to comprehend the 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 ones below it. My work diagrams the way we look at reality, tracing the evolution of our beliefs, which sometimes shift incrementally as we absorb new information, and other times more radically, like when we juxtapose art with science and ask 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. 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). He recently completed a kinetic photographic sculpture installation that was commissioned for an international climate change conference at Cornell University and is permanently displayed at the Cornell Botanic Gardens.