Digital

I situate my visual art practice on the edge of image making conventions. Through it, I interrogate today’s dominant design sensibility as pertains to 2D visual production and the purchase it commands on what counts as form. Its imperatives and directives derive, I argue, from the foundational Cartesian values of clarity and distinctness. My work redresses the foreclosure of alternative visual sensibilities under the hegemony of the clear and distinct image. It explores other commencements in the critical absence of novel artistic commitments to the visual sense and existential experience by locating making not in intention, but in suggestion; not in prescription, but in provocation; not in revelation and representation, but in mystery and murkiness; not in preconceived ideas, but in the suggestive potential of extant material conditions.

By these means, my work plots a new optics of vivid first impressions, new perceptual possibilities, probable geometries, unforeseen practical realities, and unimagined subjectivities. The material context of this work is a growing body of perplexing grayscale images: digital adjustments of photographic documentation of ordinary, everyday objects of passing, though energetic interest. The images are the result of redirecting one of the most topical implements of design - image-editing software - away from its intended and accepted use of enhancing and making more refined and recognizable the objects at a seeming disposal to distorting and making fuzzy and unrecognizable their elusive material countenance. The images erase, not imperfections of source objects, but source objects themselves. Remaining are not, by being clearer and more distinct, more determinate objects, but radically indeterminate ones inviting interpretation at a foundational level. Concocted is a supple, dynamic process of production promoting not the legibility of objects, but the construction through visual media of dense material auras in which to become caught and reflectively absorbed.