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Jeffrey Halstead (b. Pickering, Ontario, 1984) is a multidisciplinary artist working between architecture, moving image, and the digital condition—where spaces think, screens breathe, and light becomes a recording of absence. His practice unfolds as a dialogue between the built environment and the technologies that render it visible. Trained as both an architect and visual artist, Halstead works through media that measure and mis-measure perception: projection, 3D scanning, and spatial mapping. Each becomes a way of tracing the limits of vision—how the act of looking itself becomes a structure of control, memory, and desire.
His trajectory emerges from research in architectural phenomenology and digital forensics. Halstead’s work examines the aesthetic and psychological residues of technological seeing—the ways remote sensing and scanning produce not only information but affect: latency, loss, compression, delay. As an artist with ADHD and OCD, he experiences the world in loops—time fractured, attention recursive. His installations channel this condition as method, using fragmentation and repetition not as failure but as form.
Halstead’s recent works deploy 1:1 projection mappings that cause sites and images to duplicate themselves until the boundary between real and rendered collapses. These spatial doubles—constructed through photogrammetric scans, rendered light, and low-cost digital tools—become environments where surveillance, memory, and automation converge. His installations collapse the line between evidence and illusion, between labor and its simulation, articulating perception as a shared hallucination. Whether in a gallery or an exterior landscape, his works construct spaces that look back at the self—haunted architectures of the recent past.
Halstead has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, Los Angeles, and Venice. He holds an MFA (2023) from Columbia University and previously worked closely with architect Frank Gehry on residential and institutional projects. Halstead is a three-time MacDowell Fellow and an Art Omi Resident. He lives and works between Toronto and New York.
