Seffa Klein Spins Cosmological Webs

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Seffa Klein, 26, Los Angeles and Northern Arizona (@seffaklein)

Title of work: WEB (Walk Through Zero), 2023. 

Where to see it: “WEBs: Where Everything Belongs” at SFA Advisory (45 White Street, New York), until May 31.

Three words to describe it: Imaginary, terminal, sincere.

What was on your mind at the time: This work is part of a series called WEBs, which is an extension of my prior series, Gazes. The Gaze paintings emerged as a meditation on the power of one’s focused attention to develop higher-order structures within one’s consciousness, thereby accessing a sense of order in the universe. They also reference my practice of “sun gazing” in which I’m able to safely gain energy from looking at the sun for short periods when it’s low on the horizon. With the WEBs, I’ve created radiating compositions that encompass more complex forms than the Gazes, finding interconnectivity between many of the materials and ideas I’ve explored over the past ten years. 

They propose the mindset that through our gaze we can perceive that everything truly belongs in the universe. Every day we weave the proverbial web of our attention, and its shape determines what we catch. The visual language expressed beneath the plaster-relief scaffolds and the radiating bismuth facade has emerged from my attention to forms that repeat across all scales: flower petals, electron orbitals, fluid dynamics, phase changes, and supernovae. I want to evoke a sense of belonging in that mystery—the familiar-mysterious, the uncharted-comfortable, the experience of looking at the stars. These kinds of paradoxical feelings help us open our minds to the multifaceted nature of the universe. 

With WEB (Walk Through Zero), I was creating a doorway through the ontology of a previous body of work (MDT) by using its quintessential symbols of a circle interwoven with a square. The ontology proposes your connection to everything in existence, but this title is asking “what’s beyond the universe?” Walking through zero is also walking through infinity, and the radiating gaze form is the invitation to pass through and beyond all of it.

An interesting feature that’s not immediately noticeable: The subtle presence of painted bubbles rising implies water in a state of transformation, and indexes the presence of heat. From a fairly physics-oriented perspective, I associate heat with more motion, energy, and resultantly higher states of organization (the birth of galaxies, nucleosynthesis, cellular life). The bismuth itself, as a heavy element, only forms during the highest-energy, hottest events in the universe: collisions between neutron stars. 

In our society, hotness is a metaphor for desirability, fertility, and success by no small coincidence—heat is life.
 The bubbles also play with the saying that “a watched pot never boils.” I made a point to watch water boil when I was growing up. My patience felt like a rebellion, like if I could keep my attention fixed for long enough maybe I could unlock some of the mysteries of substance-changing states. The word “sublime” refers to something grand that inspires awe, but in chemistry, the word also describes the process by which a solid substance becomes a vapor.  When we experience the sublime as an emotion, it feels like there is a death of solidity or definition, almost like we do become a vapor of self. Hence, the words are homonyms, but maybe they’re also synonyms.  

How it reflects your practice as a whole: This work directly connects with my prior body of work, Multiple Displacement Theory (MDT), which proposes an ontology of equal access to information from what I call the “circle world” and the “square world.” The circle world represents the infinite, celestial bodies, the origin, the immaterial. The square world is our upright, 90-degree physical reality, the position-orienting grid-cells in our brains, the architectural, the tangible. The idea is that both are interwoven and equal—one does not need to supersede the other, and that anyone can have access to either world at any time (as opposed to the common sentiment that the “square world” is the only world that one has “real” agency in).

One song that captures its essence: “Blackstar” by David Bowie. (“At the center of it all, your eyes.”)