Seth Howe: Symbols of Sight

Seth Howe, The Mechanism of Seeing, in "Picturing Light" at FIT. Photo courtesy of the artist
 

By CARLOTA GAMBOA October 28, 2024

Seth Howe is an artist who is driven by a desire to reach his limits of perception. The son of an engineer, Howe studied architecture at Cornell, and then moved to New York City, where he received an MFA from Hunter College, establishing a foundation that would later blossom into an exploration of form and light. Though Howe found early success in his aspirations as an architect, by his late 20s Howe began to realize that the day-to-day reality of what once was his dream field might not meet long-term emotional needs. The task for Howe’s work is translating conceptual ideals into physical realities, and though both mediums—architecture and sculpture work—share physical properties, Howe admits that “both battle different mindsets.” In the last decade or so, Howe has taken a serious pivot into the field of art-making, and despite his continuation of working as an architect, he acknowledges certain limitations when it comes to the expansion of his thinking.

It all started about 12 years ago when Howe was living bicoastally between Los Angeles and New York. In what he describes as a “love-affair” with the West Coast, the artist and architect would at one point discover a form that would take on a life of its own within his practice. In a warehouse studio in Culver City, Howe began to play with raw aluminum pieces that he’d previously been using to build tables and didn’t want to throw away. Originating from the desire to create a spatial object that was as minimal as possible, something emerged from “a primitive movement, like stacking bricks,” says Howe. However, the object that came from a kind of collective muscle memory soon started “teaching me how to see,” he continues, “and clarifying how to see.” Because Howe’s sculptures are not embodied by representative shapes but by abstract industrial forms, they unconsciously start relating to history, one pertaining to the industrial complex, and a modernist commentary of objects.

Seth Howe. Photo: Peter Murdock

Howe’s work does not gravitate towards the interpretive, and therefore much is left to the imagination. Not only is the viewer asked to stretch their interpretive imagination, but the artist is as well. By allowing sculptural shape to inform him rather than the other way around, Howe is able to use the object as something to look through like a lens, or a telescope, that alters the visual properties of his world. Deeply influenced by the philosophical ideals of phenomenology, Howe’s work aims to push those who come into contact with his pieces into questioning their habitual processes of perspective. Regardless if one notices or not, certain pieces of art have a way of imposing their intentions onto the space they occupy. This is how Howe's practice alters the life of not only his own visual landscape, but those who come into the vicinity of his work. “It becomes less of an object and more of something to look at the world though,” he says, “a construction of how to see the world. Instead of moving through things mechanically. It discourages us from taking certain realities for granted.”

The intentions behind Howe’s pieces don’t need to be convoluted or complex, doused with personal meanings, but are streamlined intentions intent on altering the visual properties of a room. Something like Fred Sandbank’s yarn sculptures, found at Dia Beacon, where limited materials still impose themselves so significantly on a space and alter how people move around in it. Howe hopes that when people find themselves in the presence of his work, they are drawn to move around it, to try and understand it, and change what would’ve once been a different course around a gallery space. Howe’s pieces ask viewers to walk around them, to participate in them, to allow them to alter a viewer in any certain way. 

Seth Howe, The Mechanism of Seeing, in "Picturing Light" at FIT. Photo courtesy of the artist

All of Howe’s sculptures are derivations of the original project, whether smaller, wider, or prints of images taken while the sculpture was once in motion, all of his pieces have become limbs from a larger body, “offshoots that came from the first sculpture,” he calls it. “I like the idea that there’s a source object, that there’s an original that everything has played off of.” During the pandemic, when Howe’s rate of production was accelerated by the amount of freetime most of us found ourselves with, Howe was working out of a studio located in an old Jersey City tobacco factory. Twice a year the building would have open studios and allow the public to come in and see what the artists in progress were working on. That’s when Howe met the director of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and was asked to consider participating in their show Picturing Light. Featuring work that uses light and illumination as a central theme of their pieces, Howe has presented one of his largest sculptures to date.

The 12-foot piece, The Mechanism of Seeing, is composed of the same alternating precision engineered metal, while “reflections and angles create a complex environment,” from within the prism, “as the whole city gets reflected in it.” Located by the FIT’s lobby window, whoever passes by the space is sure to catch a glimpse of the massive aluminum suncatcher, as shards of light are reflected back from mirror-finished surfaces within the work. Howe’s focus for this piece is the same as his other pieces. He is attempting a kind of study or mock up of movement. Howe’s fascination with space and the body is ultimately less about style, or a direct preconceived message, and more about transcending space itself through the expansion of it. 

To learn more about Seth Howe, please visit his website and follow him on Instagram @sethhowe_art.  WM