In his first solo exhibition, Ebbs at Ki Smith Gallery, Dylan knits the digital and physical into a hybrid space, encouraging interactive engagement with each sculpture through a corresponding, looping animation that sets the work in motion on the viewer’s phone screen. Reitz combines traditional forms of art with more modern digital media, creating installations that ruminate on motion, space, and time.
These moving portraits exist both within and outside of the viewer’s immediate perception of the physical world. They’re heavily inspired by Reitz’s own, meticulous practice, as well as by the perpetual motion of the tides and the slow geological processes that shape the surface of our Earth. Reitz’s use of technology, rather than being central to the work, is a means of extending the meditative creative process and exploration of natural cycles. Once the viewer witnesses the work come to life, its movement lingers like an afterimage in the presence of the stationary sculpture, collapsing the categories of virtual and lived experiences into a beautiful expression of subtle playfulness and contemplative thought.
Throughout the body of work, both organic shape and geometric form are equally displayed. They emerge in gently variant shades of white with surfaces that are textured, layered, and at times extend past the two-dimensionality of the frame in protruding slopes that recall the surface of the ocean or the moon. Closer inspection of the work reveals its delicacy: Reitz has executed the work of recycled papermaking, thus also creating the material with which he sculpts. This incredibly slow and thoughtful process is integral to the concept of Ebbs.
“My work is process-forward, and be it while making paper or animating, I enter a calming flow. In this series, I wanted to communicate the feeling that occurs when a moment stretches out or condenses, in which you feel outside yourself.”
"The works of Ebbs recalls surfaces beyond our grasp: ripple of waves far out at sea, craters on the moon, damp earth at the bottom of a ravine. When one considers these textures that compose our world and the planets beyond, one grows connected to the slow processes of nature which our lifetimes only punctuate. Dylan engages with this occurrence through his meditative practice of recycled papermaking. Each layer of paper is the result of meticulous and focused physical labor. The creation of these works is inextricably linked to their final presentation, in which variant shades of white highlight nuances like texture, thin shadow, and delicacy.
The concept of deep time is as central to Reitz's work as the idea that our perception of time made fascinating by the digital. Each piece has a corresponding animation by Reitz, giving the work a lifetime that reached beyond the gallery space. The undulating images you'll witness will gently alter your consideration of the work, implying motion where none exists, suggesting other movements that stem from your imaginative capacity.
In Ebbs, Reitz expresses how the animation of an artwork extends the object's moment in time, and how, conversely, it becomes a snapshot. He invites us to contemplate the malleability of time."
