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In this piece, a radical work of Dutch architecture becomes the raw material for a series of experiments with time. Born in a computer, the building jumps again into video where it can mutate freely. Here, particles becomes pixels and matter becomes light, as the structure is melted, frozen, shattered, and melted again into a new, transmissible signal. Shot at the H2O expo, Zierikzee, The Netherlands. Architect: Lars Spueybroek/NOX. "Van McElwee transports his viewers hypnotically, viscerally, imaginatively through ingenious fascinating images and sounds. Traveling through his video art, you know you’re in the hands of a dreamer and an artist." - Diane Carson, St. Louis Riverfront Times

The screen is slit into colors. Through this moves a pattern that is constantly warped by waves. Another space opens up; level upon level of form is revealed. Clusters of voices repeat themselves. Alternating percussion and sharp edits counerpoint the auiovisual flow.

Waves of variation reveal the contours of impossible form, as if the process of decay were reversed, causing delicate structures to emerge from the grain of chaos. “McElwee’s work is pure image-making…quite beautiful.” - Robert Duffy, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Movie theaters are temples that have morphed into labyrinths, architectural fractals leading from the actual to the virtual. These multiplexes steer a diverse public through branching hallways to imaginary worlds, where the labyrinth shatters into glowing handheld screens. Designed as a movie for phones, PLEX is an architectural model of an endless cinema, made from a set of twenty black cube interiors filled with colored screens and artificial lobby music. A spiraling camera path connects the cube units into a free-form structure that occasionally loops back on itself, creating intersections of cascading screens. An external view would reveal a chain of cubes endlessly exploring a 3D grid of possibilities. The cubes play like wind chimes, blown by chance.

In Buddhist architecture, the pagoda symbolizes Nirvana, the state of enlightenment. In Radio Island, this metaphor is expanded to include the entire built environment and the whole of ordinary consciousness. Mutating images of ancient and modern Japanese structures develop within a complex electronic score of radio signals and data transmission. Unusual editing techniques weave these images and sounds into a dense field of improvisation. The resulting texture becomes the raw material for totally new forms. Through a sea of noise, Radio Island charts a course from architecture to music; from the referential to the absolute.

FOLDED FOLLIES is an improvisation on Bernard Tschumi’s deconstructionist follies at Parc La Villette in Paris. The structures, which the architect has described as "post-humanist, are translated into motion and then subjected to a radical transformation. Unusual demands are made of the recording capability of the medium, as video and audio signals are pushed to extremes. Space collapses and the follies are literally folded in time.

Mirroring the flux of dreams and memories, travel footage from a period of intense image gathering (roughly the 1990s) is woven into a grainy hypnotic tapestry; video into dream, dream into video. Dream Travel and Travel Dream are designed to be shown together. Dream Travel is both a shamanic journey and a formally inventive synthesis." Peter Rose, Filmmaker "Beautiful, compelling... deliriously ecstatic.” David Finkelstein, Film Threat

Elevator music branches and flows in new directions. Unadorned concrete structures exude layer upon layer of natural scenery. These virtual vistas unfold in surges, accompanied by mutating Muzak. Natureland reflects the crucial process by which we navigate the nested realities of our programmed environment, embracing illusion and its mechanism, weaving dissonant strands of experience into a pattern that we can call "our world." "The expansion of consciousness, the creation of timelessness and the generation of new worlds embody beauty without boundaries in Van McElwee’s video art. His work is challenging; it compels us to experience, perceive, and ultimately to live more fully." T.L. Reid, Afterimage “Breathtaking,” David Finkelstein, Film Threat

A wandering figure traces tunnels through a space of possibilities. “… A kind of evocative visual poetry, equally stimulating to the eye and the mind” David Finkelstein, Film Threat

Transfinite Loops is a reflection on the mind's tendency to create metaphysical order in the face of chaos. The piece is both a model and a metaphor for that process. Nighttime images of carnival rides appear, mesh and then dissolve into blackness, accompanied only by the sound of wind. The work unfolds like a series of thoughts, as time and space are unraveled and woven back together into intricate knots. "As gorgeous as any fireworks display, Van McElwee’s Transfinite Loops invents dazzling astral patterns." -Stephen Holden, The New York Times "Vivid video origami erupts into a blizzard…leading out of time & space" -TL Reid, Afterimage "Transfinite Loops is infectious, life-affirming and beautiful. It makes you feel good." -David Bonetti, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Three garden paths twist and turn through a labyrinth of time. The earth orbits the sun as a camera orbits the gardens. Six years are cut and folded as a playful edit-form spins its web. "Ultimately, Mcelwee is tracking the effect of time on nature as he moves from summer to winter and back again. Editing is the key here to this complex origami project (think of each edit as a crease)." -Ann-Sargent Wooster, artist, writer

This house is under construction. Its design incorporates numerous points of view into one flowing form. The sound is a field of musical patterns without a tonal center.

Apparitions, maze marchers, new world natives. Recorded in Minecraft and Aguas Calientes, Peru.

In communal celebrations, such as parades, the event creates a new space. A city becomes a fantastic version of itself; a new creature that erupts in the streets and then disappears. In Procession, awareness is given a richly dimensional vantage point on this phenomenon. The parade’s flow is intensely modulated by editing, folded into itself again and again. Waves of transformation surge through a fabric of recurring moments, until the river of time swells and floods its banks. Also available as a muli-channel installation.

A video camera floating through a real-world Chinese sky labyrinth produces nine video clips arranged by chance. In each of these units, a different part of the original cave dissolves in and out of a luminous mist, creating a new labyrinth from the old. In these frozen clouds, nothing changes but our viewpoint.

A dream of coming and going, of a world deep in time.