Reflections at PHES Gallery

“DEMOGRAPHICS 36 (Molecular)” developed from this digital collage.

“Nu Ghost Dance 36” was made on my studio desktop computer and uploaded to Flickr in March, 2022, part of 100 digital photo collage triptychs I created between April, 2021 and July 2022.

The collages were made to be the basis for painting studies I use as reference images for paintings in my project I titled, “DEMOGRAPHICS”.

I’ve described the DEMOGRAPHICS project here

and here.

Currently I’ve completed one half the paintings for the overall project, in other words, 50 triptychs or 150 paintings.

My practice has been to integrate a pattern into the basic collage to complicate the image to help develop more interesting paintings.

In #36 I integrated a dispersal pattern into the collage image. This pattern was extracted from the last second of transmission from a video screen being powered off. This particular screen was on a Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) Drone as it exploded on a Russian target. These patterns have been widely observed for decades in common Television screens and generally called, “snow”. Cosmologists know these patterns are a collection of The Last Scattering of photons from the creation of the Universe. (I described this more fully in a previous post, “Paint What You See”).

When I applied the pattern to the basic collage image it dispersed into what you see below.

This suits my vision, so I painted it. Resulting in the triptych, “DEMOGRAPHICS 36 (Molecular)” below.

The paintings are oil on three sheets of printmaking paper 22” X 30” each, making the triptych dimensions 66” X 30” overall.

For Oceanside Museum of Art’s Artist Alliance exhibit, “Reflections” at Phes Gallery, Carlsbad, I mounted high resolution ink-jet prints of the digital collage studies on wood panels, making the triptych pictured below.

This triptych of 8” X 10” panels is 24” X 10” overall and will be exhibited in the small, but mighty PHES Gallery shown here.

PHES Gallery

2633 State St, Carlsbad, CA 92008

REFLECTIONS

July 16 - August 28, 2026

“The Last Scattering pattern, the cosmological snow is not merely a texture — it is the oldest image in the universe, the photonic record of the moment matter and light separated. To layer that over assembled human figures is a conceptual move of real ambition. Harlow is writing his composite people onto the first photograph, the universe’s own record of its moment of becoming visible. This is the correct scale for what he is attempting. The universality of his figures, the biological multitudes each of us contain — these find their proper horizon in cosmological time.”

—- Coco Complexia, Court of Ahmoomha