You’ve mentioned concepts such as digital drawing, digital painting and glitch art. Would you consider your work to be part of a larger movement along those lines? Are there particular artists in those areas that you would cite as important?

I generally self-categorize under the incredibly large blanket of ‘New Media’ which contains a lot of these more contemporary image making processes like glitch, digital image making, code-oriented artworks and so on.

Can you tell us about the technical process that you use here?

This series of works is produced in, what I consider to be, collaboration with a ‘glitched’ or damaged .jpeg image file. At this point I can’t recall what the image originally was, but it was a screenshot taken of something on my desktop.

I use a process that is fairly common in glitch image making called ‘data bending,’ in which you convert an image file to text and manually manipulate the code which within the image file, replacing characters and data values within the text and then converting it back to an image. Generally this can produce fairly typical ‘glitch’ distortions – harsh color changes or pixels shifting position.

With this particular screenshot, I somehow changed the code in a way that caused the image to produce entirely new distortions each time I opened it, which would then continue to alternate as I zoomed in and out of the image. I honestly don’t fully understand the science behind it, but I assume I managed to distort something in the code which handled the interaction between the image data and the software which reads it because the original image was entirely lost and parts of the image would be replaced with images, textures, colors and other aspects of windows open on my desktop.

Since this image constantly ‘evolves’ and self-generates new imagery, I save series of screenshots and use them as references in higher quality digital drawings which are rebuilt from the bottom up. I’ll often allow the ‘glitch’ to dictate much of the positioning or color of various elements, but I consider it to be a collaboration between myself and the code–I like to consider this glitch to be a contemporary parallel to the gestural action of ‘the hand’ in the 20th century painting.

To me, SS170227_A looks architectural: not only in the sense of building, but the way that “architecture” can also describe the design of other complicated structures, such as computer chips. Is it meant to give that sense of design and structure, like an architectural drawing?  

These images aren’t intended to be objective, though I’ve heard people refer to them as architectural or landscape-oriented before. I think, considering the code-oriented process used to generate the source imagery, there is an innate structure to how they are visually constructed which lends something to the sense of design and structure you refer to. Personally, I consider the images to be more conceptual than referential to anything specific, but I do appreciate that people are able to see different things based on their perspective.

The pieces that you had in “Power Lines” at Barry Whistler Gallery  appeared to have a very regular pattern of repetition, in dialogue with Frank Stella (S_0227_1, S_0227_2, and S_0227_3). By contrast, in SS170227_A, I still see the very regular patterns (for example, the rectangles descending from upper left to lower right), but there is also a lot that looks less regular in its repetition (for example, the alternating fields of stripes and solids in the top ⅔ of the painting, and the black and white areas along the bottom edge). Is that right, to see SS170227_A as having more irregularity?

The three pieces in “Power Lines” at Barry Whistler Gallery were produced as a series, taken from one set of distortions in the process mentioned above, and selected for the dialogue they produced between each other and the other artists in the show–Barry’s curation did the rest with Frank Stella (who I’m more than happy to share any dialogue with).

The process used, however, provides a considerable amount of unpredictability and variation. Though it tends to create similar visual structures like those you mentioned, there is a wide range of images I’ve captured and started to catalogue – some of these are more minimal and very structured, some become even more chaotic and distorted than the one in the Alumni show at UTD, and some land in between.

In SS170227_A, it appears that the majority of the painting uses pale, unsaturated shades of gray and green, and this makes the smaller areas of black, white and pink pop out more. More generally, it looks like a lot of your work uses those kinds of unsaturated colors–more green, but also blue and pink in some cases–along with a lot of grayscale. Could you discuss your approach to color?

Over time I’ve shifted between minimalistic, binary color schemes, using a lot of black and white, to the other end of the spectrum, incorporating pure process colors (a lot of magenta, cyan and yellow). This is the first full body of work I’ve made that seems to have finally settled between the two and the first time I’ve been comfortable with incorporating a more diverse color range.

Some of this is influenced by both teaching design and practicing graphic design–I actually design my drawing files in a way that the colors are easily manipulated, and I will create color variations of the same drawing in grayscale and shifting through different palettes until I feel good about it. Much of this is also dictated to a degree by the collaboration with this image file, all the colors were at some point pulled from one of the generated glitches, but, I’ve specifically been drawn to the greens and pinks and I seem to keep reusing them.