FLOATING: OSHEEN HARRUTHOONYAN
An artist merging movement with cultural heritage and renewal — through the depth of absolute black.
It's such a different feeling. I'm trying to get that across — this floating, other space.
The blackness is the whole ocean. Everything else floats within it.
The most prominent thing about Osheen Harruthoonyan's work is the blackness. Reminiscent of Anish Kapoor's Vantablack, the inkiness in his photographs has a seemingly unlimited depth — like deep space, or the complete darkness at the bottom of the ocean.
This rich tone simultaneously provides contrast to the ethereal shapes and textures that make up his otherworldly environments, while offering a sea for the viewer to sink into — an abyss that elicits a physical and psychological reaction akin to being suspended in water.
The recurring imagery — celestial skies, nebulous forms, rolling clouds — are layered with textures to create surreal worlds that feel familiar but different, achieving the sensation of floating the artist aims for.
The dance between gravity and time. The space in between that connects them.
Osheen's interest in astronomy, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics — and his fascination with how they connect to biology — forms the deep foundation of everything he creates. The water-like forms in his work appear to float upward, or to bounce in response to sound waves.
Circular forms offer the impression of planets. White spots ebb and flow to create milky galaxies. Various textures evoke watery waves, ripples, and splashes. The negative space in his work depicts the dance between gravity and time — the space in between that connects them.
The way an organism and idea forms, the process it changes and manipulates.
Biology is as central to Osheen's work as astronomy. The way an organism forms, changes, and manipulates — the interconnected worlds of the cosmic and the cellular — is a never-ending black hole of information to feast on.
His work makes people question their space, their environment, their psychological state. These voids pull the viewer in, raising questions and memories. The language of his images is of other earths and familiar spaces — but it is those deep blacks that centre everything, creating movement and giving them weight.
The Artists, Filmmakers & Scientists Who Made Him
I am creating alternate worlds where memory, history, and identity are questioned, formed, and manipulated.
Osheen's personal history as a refugee from the Iran-Iraq war, woven together with Armenian culture, forms a profound layer beneath every image. These experiences are not background — they are the very material of his work.
He is interested in cultural heritage and renewal — the way identity persists, shifts, and reasserts itself through generations, through displacement, through darkness. In these uncertain and dark times, there is always a light. His work insists on this.
Much-anticipated. A body of work that suspends the viewer in deep space — or the bottom of the ocean. The difference, he says, is harder to name than it is to feel.
"Surfer, Ocean Beach SFO" Silver gelatin print. Image © Osheen Harruthoonyan
"Morphogenesis" Silver gelatin prints. Image © Osheen Harruthoonyan