Aerial
Offline, 4’W X 4’H, Acrylic on Panel, 2022
Blank Spot on the Map, 4’W X 4’H, Acrylic on Panel, 2022
Dropped Pin, 4’W X 4’H, Acrylic on Panel, 2021
Three paintings, Dropped Pin, The Blank Spot on the Map, and Offline, utilize the language of the pixel to construct color fields that reference camouflage, digital imaging, and surveillance aesthetics. Each painting considers a landscape from the digital perspective, breaking down its composition into its fundamental colors and obscuring the land itself, creating a sense of camouflage with moments of hypervisibility. Each painting is approached using the same set of rules that determine the final structure of the painting. This approach places each pixel in the position of being noise and myself as the artist as the algorithm. In determining the pallet for each painting, I work to break the landscape down into its most prevalent color information, encoding the landscape from information to noise. I render each pixel of noise based on the set of information provided to me by the rows of pixels left uncovered in the painting. In this way I am working similarly to computational imaging, however, instead of creating information, information is concealed.
The construction of these paintings resembles both aerial views of developed landscape and digital camouflage. The resemblance to aerial views of developed landscape puts them in conversation with the aesthetics of surveillance. With the advancement of technology, we are becoming increasingly comfortable with God's eye view. In Aerial and satellite photography, there is no horizon line, giving no sense of orientation, destabilizing traditional concepts of linear time and space within the image. Without a horizon line, one cannot determine their relationship to their surroundings. These three works appropriate these aesthetics and break them down further, deconstructing the aerial perspective into an image that reads as digital noise, amplifying the disorientation.