Rock Star 12 — Out of Plane

Here, the frame doesn’t simply loosen — it fails.

Rather than extending outward evenly, the image begins to skew, warp, and collapse along its own surface. The picture plane bends. The bottom edge gives way. The sense of “ground” disappears. What remains is not depth in a traditional sense, but dimensional instability — a feeling that the image no longer occupies a single, reliable plane.

This is not 3D, and it is not perspective. There is no vanishing point, no illusion of space receding neatly into the distance. Instead, the space itself appears under stress, as if the image were caught mid-transition between states. The guitar and figure remain legible, but the environment around them becomes volatile — pulled inward in some areas, swollen outward in others.

Liquify tools were used intentionally, not to distort the subject, but to deform the space around it. Subtle applications of “sucker” and “bloat” introduce pressure and curvature, creating a warped field where motion behaves inconsistently. The result is a sense of being slightly out of alignment — as if the image has slipped out of its assigned dimension.

The black surrounding the image is no longer passive background. It presses inward. It behaves like mass. It interrupts, intrudes, and destabilizes the composition rather than framing it. The image doesn’t sit inside the void — it is being eroded by it.

In this way, Out of Plane extends the ideas behind Without Square rather than repeating them. Where earlier works rejected containment, this piece questions the stability of the container itself. The square is no longer something to escape — it’s something that can no longer hold.

Sound has always been central to this work. A guitar is not just an object here; it’s a source of vibration — a frequency strong enough to bend structure. The image behaves the way loud sound feels: not directional, not polite, and not confined to the space it’s supposed to occupy.

Rock Star 12 — Out of Plane exists between moments. Between surfaces. Between dimensions. It is less an image of a performance than a record of pressure — what happens when motion, sound, and energy exceed the limits of the plane meant to contain them.