SEAN MICKA

Time-Images: Blue Velvet, Red Dawn (2024-25)

These pictures hover between representation and abstraction: they could be mistaken for satellite images of the earth’s surface (LANDSAT) yet remain tethered to the intimate scale of photographed textiles. I chose velvet partly because it frequently appears as a backdrop in auction catalog photography, framing objects of luxury and desire.

For me, these works also function as “time-images.” Inspired by Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on The Fold and Bergsonism, they visualize time as matter: surface in flux, duration embodied in folds. ¹ The images capture instants of suspension, evoking the simultaneity of movement and stillness.

The colors themselves carry layered associations. Blue velvet recalls David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986), with its vision of suburban surfaces concealing hidden violence and corruption.² Red velvet, meanwhile, reads as a red flag—a universal symbol of danger and warning. In the Cold War period, this red also recalls popular culture’s staging of ideological conflict. John Milius’s film Red Dawn (1984), for instance, imagined a group of American teenagers forming an improvised resistance movement after a Soviet invasion of the Midwest.³ In that film, the red flag of communism is met with guerrilla warfare and patriotic sacrifice—a fictional allegory of Cold War anxieties. By echoing such symbols, my fabric paintings fold together historical memory, cinematic fantasy, and contemporary abstraction.

Together, these velvet works extend the dialectic of my practice. If the resistance portraits preserve erased human histories and the auction paintings confront the endurance of objects, the fabric paintings stage memory as surface: seductive, unstable, and coded with signs of desire, danger, and ideology. They are screens where value and history slip between exposure and concealment.

Endnotes

1. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

2. Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986).

3. Red Dawn, directed by John Milius (United Artists, 1984).