Justin Robie Wood

My installations synthesize all of this into environments where the physical, digital, and biological collapse into each other. Projection mapping transforms debris into monument. Generative algorithms visualize system breakdown. Living systems (hydroponics, organic materials) prove we can't easily reverse the contamination while expanding the concept of immersive installations into scientific inquiry. Everything investigates the interface. The moment between, the transition state, the dirty overlap where one thing becomes another.

I've been on a 15 year quest to ask what happens when you add time to painting. While living in the Florida Keys I spent a lot of time looking at water. The water is always moving and evolving without really changing. It doesn't try and tell you a story. I want my projection paintings to retain the same kind of gaze from the viewer as a traditional painting while using the video mapping to make it continually evolve. I don't want a narrative. I don't want to interrupt the meditative mind state that a painting evokes. I want these works to force the viewer to question where the real world ends and the digital world begins.

My screen paintings engage the physical and digital, using video screens to illuminate semi-translucent collages made from inkjet inks, transparencies, and digital prints. By layering handmade marks with animated imagery, the works create a dynamic dialogue between real-world materials and digital light, inviting viewers to notice fine details, shifting textures, and evolving forms. Drawing from the history of modernist abstraction, these pieces introduce the dimension of time to painting while merging traditional techniques with the possibilities of the digital era.

I project light onto geological deep time and human catastrophe. Million-year-old rock formations. Pristine ocean surfaces. Contaminated disaster sites. Against the timescale of the universe, our failed infrastructure and our remediation efforts are both instantaneous. But light on stone reveals that even ancient geology is just another surface where consciousness temporarily stabilizes into form.

My painting practice grounds everything in the physical. Even in the age of total digital immersion, there's something about pigment on surface that carries authority screens can't replicate. They prove that the digital aesthetic has eaten backwards into physical media, that screens have rewired how we see even when we're not looking at them.

Many of these works are hybrids that mix video mapping, digital animation and photography. My time dilation series was born from an instinct to capture my remote projections at higher resolution and detail than video recording. I decided to split the projection content into frames and photograph them one by one over several hours. The resulting effect is the simultaneous experience of watching the projection mapping in real-time while the world around it moves in timelapse. My digital animations are born from content intended from projections that can stand on their own as individual artworks.

My generative code work creates infinite systems that never repeat. Algorithmic compositions generate new abstract geometries every second forever, digital cities evolving from networks of nodes, interactive 3D animations leaving frame trails like motion through time made visible, noise-based flow fields mimicking water, consciousness, the way information moves through networks.

My curatorial practice puts technologically integrated works next to traditional painting and sculpture to prove they belong in the same conversation. Video mapping next to oil on canvas. Generative code next to glass.