Artist’s Statement

Stephen Calhoun, born 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio USA, is a self-taught artist working in a variety of modalities, most prominently photography, mixed process new media, digital cinema, generative art, stochastic art and sound design. His use of technology counts him exclusively as a digital artist since 2003.Starting as a self-taught graphic designer in 1985, he was a hobbyist painter from 1993-2002. He took up procedural, generative digital art in 2003. In 2009, he took up digital photography, and soon began fusing photography with generative procedures. His experiments have focused on complexity, iteration, and symmetry since 2012. In 2022 he began to investigate how to incorporate prompt/diffusion technology into his iterative art practice. Partly a conceptual artist, Calhoun intends his art to experientially magnetize projection or contemplation or intuition.

2025 finds him designing participatory artworks that are far from the iterative art he is well known for yet at the same are centered by his decades-old research into experiential learning and, to borrow from John Dewey, ‘art as experience.’

He was discovered by Cleveland art maven and gallerist Deba Gray in 2014. He was 59 years old at that life altering moment. His debut solo exhibition, The Grasp of Order, was presented by Ms. Gray and Serena Harrigan at Grays Auctioneers in Cleveland 2016-2017.

His art is most deeply influenced by music. He was an instrumentalist—mainly pedal and lap steel guitars, synthesizers—and sound designer/composer, producing ten recordings under the name Kamelmauz between 2001-2015.

As well, he is a theorist in the field of experiential learning and its role in adult development. He is retired from the workaday world, having worked in organizational development and in the music industry.

He has exhibited widely in juried, group, solo, and curated shows. Artworks are in over one hundred private collections. His current artistic catalogue of archival prints to paper, aluminum, vinyl, acrylic, cloth, light box, and glass is available variously in small limited and final editions (which add a single artist’s proof to the edition.) Additionally select artworks are available around the world through various partners, including Singulart in Paris. He also sells his art from his web site, artiststephencalhoun.com.

July 2025