New - John Paul Caponigro Art

Reconnaissance

Though this work began much earlier, making my series Reconnaissance has become a big part of my personal pandemic story. Having returned from Antarctica days before the 2020 United States quarantine, I watched as events unfolded on the global stage, stunned by the toll the virus was taking. Crushed by heavy emotions about the pandemic, I used art as prayer. I could no longer travel, so I started spending a part of my days traveling virtually with Google Earth, capturing images of these satellite views. I turned off the display of borders and scanned the whole world for other signs of life in remote places. The beauty I was certain I would find never failed to astonish me. It lifted my spirits as I hovered above the earth virtually and celebrated her.

I added my own touches to these images, combining them with many different elements – galaxies, eyes, smoke, drawings, and many other things. Once enough images were made it became clear that my initial experiments were maturing into finished works. It took some time and many images to determine that, once again but in a different way, waveforms were becoming the core of the work – sine waves, sound waves, encephalographs. electrocardiographs, seismographs, and more.

The experiment turned into an obsession and the works continue to spawn many more variants. These images have become a meta-series that touches most of my other series, like My Antarctica Dreaming. Pieces can be seen collectively as a whole – Reconnaissance – and many individual images also live comfortably in other series (Those with smoke work well with my series Global Warning, the ones with galaxies fit my series Constellation, and still others with drawings find places in Alignment.), while the ones that don’t may yet give birth to still more series.