plankton
2022
Rendered images and moving image
Presented as prints, approx. 100 × 80 cm each, and as a video installation
Tools: Cinema 4D, Octane Render
The work
plankton belongs to The Archive of Mental Images. It shows a field of figures made of ice, each holding a small light at its heart.
The name comes from the Greek planktos, “drifter.” Plankton cannot swim against the current; it goes where the ocean takes it. The work asks whether people are so different, carried by currents of fate we cannot see, protected by quiet defenses we hardly notice.
The figures were built in Cinema 4D and rendered in Octane, staying close to the original image. The work has been shown as prints and as a video installation. It holds the old question of determinism and free will without answering it, leaving open whether drifting is surrender or the only way to move at all.
About
Rey is an artist and researcher based in New York and London, working across installation, moving image and painting. Rey studied philosophy and fine art at Columbia University and the Royal College of Art, and draws on research into perception and care environments. The work begins with mental images, the pictures that form in the mind before they have a shape, and gives them a place in the world: quiet gray rooms, dim natural light, figures that seem only half present. These form The Archive of Mental Images, an ongoing body of work documenting spontaneous mental images in close fidelity to how they first appear. Much of it is built in 3D software, alongside paintings made by hand. The practice now extends from depicting these inner spaces to building them: places of stillness and shelter for people in fragile states of mind.