Year: 2022

Medium: Digital Collage

Dimensions: 13" x 13" (all works)

This diptych is comprised of the 4th and 31st installment in a series of fifty collage pieces titled “Radiant Decay”. This series was created throughout the duration of 2022, all of which are comprised of elements taken exclusively from the Smithsonian’s Open Access Archive. The underlying purpose of these investigations was to create a collection of interconnected yet functionally independent works that are not representations of memories that were but rather of memories that never were; akin to the tradition of soundtracks or themes to films that never existed. It is meant to serve as a unique rumination on the passage of time and our relationship with it.

Artist: John T Allen (Website: www.permiandesigns.com / Instagram Handle: @permiandesigns)

John T. Allen possessed a passion for the arts from an early age and experimented with a wide variety of both physical and digital media during his final years of high school in the late 2000s. He attended the Catholic University of America School of Architecture and Planning where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 2013, after which he received both a Master of Science in Sustainable Design and a Master of Architecture (specifically in the Sacred Space and Cultural Studies Concentration) in 2016 from their graduate program. In 2017, John began his A Virtual Memory project, an extensive collection of work blending both visual art and digitally-generated soundscapes around the themes of the temporal, especially deep time. John founded Permian Designs in 2019 as an outlet to showcase the entirety of his body of work dating from 2007 to present including collage, mixed media, photography, music, commissions, and architectural design proposals.