EQUIVALENTS

Presented by New York Artists Equity Association and 1000Museums

Artists: John Cox, Stephen Maine, Alicia Philley, John Pomara, and Amy Vensel

CURATED BY: JOHN COX AND ALICIA PHILLEY

CUSTOM ARCHIVAL PRINT AND CUSTOM FRAMING AVAILABLE FOR EACH DIGITAL ARTWORK

JOHN COX

 “These digital works are constructed using photos taken of a handful of my paintings over the course of their completion. Separate layers of those paintings have been reconfigured to make the visual material for my born digital works.  Details have been pulled out of context. Individual color layers have been altered and sometimes inverted. Specific marks have been reoriented, duplicated and reassembled to emphasize pattern in the compositions. Segments of these repeating marks register seamlessly while others misalign creating moments of interference. Variations in the lighting and transparency of each layer exaggerates the idiosyncrasies of the space in these works. “

STEPHEN MAINE

“These works are derived from digital photographs and scans of my acrylic-on-paper monoprints, which I disassemble and recombine in Photoshop. By treating each layer as a discrete matrix of color, I can more fully realize the conceptual premise of their physical antecedents even while removing from the process the messy business of crusty paint buckets and buckling paper. In some cases (such as #178) the representation of surface sheen harks directly back to the behavior of ambient light in the presence of a film of paint—a kind of pollution of the digital space by the characteristics of analog materiality.”

Alicia Philley

“My painting practice is rooted in material and process; the possibilities and limitations of acrylics, masking tape and wood inform content. I struggled to connect with the digital medium until I recognized the parallels between it and one of my favorite subjects—fungus. Computer code, like the hyphal tips of mycelium, relies on replication to create forms that have no visual resemblance to their parts. Process followed by applying "behaviors" of fungus to Photoshop manipulations of my painting images. Decay feeding an unplanned yet purposeful growth; stretching, shrinking, symbiosis and fruiting. Each artwork here is one stage in an ongoing transformation.”

John Pomara

John Pomara is interested in the human element of technology. The work here investigates the conventions of painting and its relationship to the digital. His spare, abstract paintings depict blurs, glitches, and printing imperfections, contradicting our vision of modern technology as seamless, cold, and rational. Inspired by entropy and mechanical failure, Pomara uses copy machines, printers, various apps, and the Internet to create visual representations of error. When arranged serially, the works recall film stills and their attendant implications of moving and inert images, as well as the motion studies of Edward Muybridge. With repeated over-printing, one image on top of another, he creates a dense, complex, layered abstraction."

Amy Vensel

“With the increase in popularity of social media as a space to share art, I’ve been posting detail images of paintings, both finished and in progress. This has led to a catalog of digital offspring that take on a life of their own. While they share the same DNA as my analog paintings, their compositions and screen-generated colors develop in ways the hand-painted source material cannot. Normally I use invented words for the titles of my paintings, so I thought it fitting to choose titles for these digital spin-offs taken from the plethora of oddly-named online retailers selling copies of popular items.”