My name is Dominic Pinney (He/Him), I am an installation-based visual artist and exhibition installation technician currently living and working on the traditional lands of the First Nations Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas; Hamilton Ontario. My recent solo show, Lost Years and Other Future Tragedies (or, Why Do I Still Fear The Mothman?) 2024 at B-Side (Hamilton, ON), was an installation and photographic exploration of urban anxiety through the lens of myth and lingering irrational fears. I hold an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor (2019) and a BFA in Painting from The Alberta College of Art + Design (2017), presently AuArts. My practice explores the ephemeral, sublime, and oftentimes unsettling qualities of urban life and the affect of liminal boundaries created by the built environment.
Working in light based installation, sculpture, photo, and new media, I construct experiential pieces which engage the viewer’s perception and place them in the dual role of participant/voyeur within the exhibition space. Inspired by the onscreen representations of the city cinema, my work incorporates fiction and lived experience to create an in-between space which is grounded in the anxiety of moving through and existing in city space.
Initially using installation and large-scale sculpture as a way to explore agoraphobic and claustrophobic compression and expansion of the city space, the warping and shifting of urban space as I felt it. Through this process, much of the lingering unease I felt at the time awakened in myself a desire to further explore urban affect and understand the unconscious ways in which our environments influence us and the ways we in turn influence our environment.
Exploring the shared experience of the built environment, I find inspiration in the ways sound and light bleed into my windows from the city outside. A city is a collective experience, yet one that all too often isolates and attempts to contain, even as the flickering energies and humm of life move beyond boundaries within this warping environment of sound, glass, and light.
Working with audio and video to explore these ideas of warped space within my installations, I record the sounds and light that enter my home from the streets outside, translating it into defamiliarized sound and mediascapes which embrace the mystery and transformations of the city space. This process has led to explorations using viewer interaction to create live looping audio/video feeds and projection/sound installations. The motif of the window and doorway is a throughline in most of my work, utilizing blinds to create semi-permeable walls and corridors within my installations that interact with my use of lighting and place the viewer on either side of faux interior and exterior space.
Through working in installation I use experiential moments to draw the viewer into participating in a simulacrum of shared space, causing them to consider the affect of these spaces outside the gallery and the responsibilities we have as inhabitants to the collective experience and to the potential of our cities.
contact
email: pinneydominic@gmail.com