The IEA was recently host to John Hudak of Dobbs Ferry, NY as our artist in residence over the week of February 24th. John has historically worked primarily in sound art, producing pieces that utilize natural and simple sounds, which form the basis of digitally manipulated audio works. He focuses on the rhythms and melodies that exist in our daily aural environments, reframing and transforming sound in our environment so it can be noted, admired, and valued.

More recently, John has taken his interest in nature to another medium: photography and digital image manipulation. On his hiking and running outings, John finds interesting leaves on the ground and holds onto them to let them dry out. He then photographs them, re-frames, and makes print work. During his time at the IEA, this work was expanded upon. Using the EverSmart Pro scanner, various leaves from John’s collection were scanned at 3000 ppi to allow for 10x enlargement for printing. IEA Member Andrew Deutsch also brought in a book of his own containing dried plant pressings from across the North East, which John photographed samples from and produced compositions from. These scans and compositions were ultimately printed large scale on the Iris printer and the Epson 11880 on a variety of media, some as large as 60×50″ in size. He also found some time to do some work in the video studio with Andrew, using the Sandin and his audio work to process images of his leaves.

Below are some images of John at work and some of the work he produced during his time here: