H Spencer Young

H Spencer Young is an internationally exhibited interdisciplinary artist and writer/director with a self-driven research practice concerned with a wide array of formal and post-conceptual challenges. Spencer works across photography, filmmaking, painting, sculpture, digital art, collage, and drawing, frequently investigating how the way we see informs the way we feel, foregrounding themes of nature, technology, image-making, and time. He is based on New York City’s Lower East Side.

Collect Bean: What does growth mean to you?

H Spencer Young: Growth is the natural result of committed engagement with a practice, sparing us none of its requisite turbulence, victories, trials, tribulations, surrenders, triumphs, fear, faith, and ennui.

Collect Bean: Where are you currently finding inspiration?

H Spencer Young: Inspiration is an all-encompassing constant. Richness, depth, entropy, birth, history, conflict, beauty, death, technology, art, nature, and love surround us every moment of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously, I allow inspiration to do its work while I do mine.

Collect Bean: How do you incorporate feedback or criticism into your artistic process? 

H Spencer Young: Feedback and criticism are essential via consistent engagement with the community, studio visits, and reverence for the viewer’s role in bringing the work to its fullest fruition.

Collect Bean: What is something that you do to stay focused? 

H Spencer Young: Choose my focal points in advance, predetermine intended depth, consider my physical position, use manual focus, and engage.

Collect Bean: How do you approach the balance between experimentation and consistency in your art?

H Spencer Young: I view this relationship as akin to the one between a boat and an anchor. The boat may drift, but eventually, the rope or chain goes taut, enforcing the maximum amount of drift. Ideally, this mechanism is internalized, subconscious. My job is to ensure that my boat is in the water, seaworthy, and heading towards open seas.