Penelope Umbrico is an artist, who currently lives and works in New York City. Her concentration being photography, she created a collage of photos by using images that already existed online, images of the same subject. In particular, Umbrico found from the web exactly 541,795 different images of a sunset. She took the suns from each photo, re-produced them as prints, and then arranged them in a chart-like and seemingly infinite grid. The artist found it unique to freeze and sublimate a sunset, let alone thousands of them, within a digital realm.
Even though the sun looks like a small spark in the sky, it is actually far greater in size than our planet itself. So, the artist thinks of the sun eternal and infinitely-expanding. The virtual world, the Internet, is an infinitely-expanding domain on its own, and the artist wanted to portray something naturally eternal through something that is digitally eternal. Watching a sunset outside and in person is far different from viewing it online.
Although the suns themselves are sort of stinging to the eyes, their background colors richly vary as one skims down the grid. For the most part, the colors are very warm and bright, with a few being very dark and cool. Looking at the grid from a distance, it feels as if though the colors are literally flickering before your eyes. There is so much going on in each photo that my eyes can't help but to desperately search for a focal point. I don't even remember which of the photos my eyes laid upon FIRST when I first saw this piece. I feel like this art is playing games with my eyes, but on the other hand, it is a rather charming game.
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