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Exploring fiction-based landscapes, Stephen Hendee’s works resemble virtual reality as it is often represented in video games, cinema, and computer-generated simulations. His polished, three-dimensional environments and sculptures clearly borrow from the palette, composition, and pixelated quality of cyberspace. While appearing to derive from sophisticated computer-enhanced technologies, his works are in reality produced with relatively mundane materials and methods: polystyrene sheets glued together and/or assembled with gaffer tape, lights wrapped in colored gels, and cardboard. Hendee’s work further explores relationships between, for example, the vocabulary of media-based technologies and forms found in nature, like crystals and rock formations, by evoking geometric patterns germane to both.
Hendee recently departed from his widely-exhibited, site-specific installations to create object-oriented, sculptural work. Escasket (2006) is a freestanding, autonomous piece that incorporates the transparent and disorienting colored light panels and graphical quality typical of many of his pieces. Yet, Hendee’s developing interest in mortality is evidenced in this piece that references the funerary form of a coffin and offers glimpses of an eerie, ghostly, supernatural membrane. Hendee’s exploration of sites of memory (such as cemeteries) relates to his important observation of technology: while purporting to liberate and simplify our lives, technology paradoxically reduces our freedom by requiring more productivity within a finite span of time.4