Digital Painting (Purple Pinch),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
The Digital Painting series is a group of works that position painting simultaneously at its most primitive and most futuristic; at once reduced to the elemental moment of mark-making and also suggestive of the technological future of the medium. The finger, a digit, is used to mark the surface in a series of repetitive gestures. While initially abstract and random in appearance, the paintings rely upon a lexicon of actions that make up navigation processes on the iPhone and other smartphones, including swipes, pinches, and taps. These gestures enact zooms, hyperlinks, movement on maps, and basic operations of communication such as typing and dialing.
Reflecting the increasing ubiquity of these gestures, I have executed the works on a variety of materials, including traditional canvas, as well as magazine pages, paper, and antimicrobial plastic. Marks are made by dipping a (gloved, a further distancing mechanism) finger into paints and applying them in a rhythmic series of gestures. The action is both automatic and determined.
These smartphone-oriented repetitive gestures are rewiring how our brains and bodies process and understand space and time. Drawing attention to the method through which we communicate, consume information, work, and play, all via simple motions of the finger, these paintings make the largely invisible traces of our actions visible.
The marks themselves formally develop curious associations through their repetition; they are suggestive of chromosomes, obsessive compulsive activity, scratching, or counting hatchmarks. Such repetitive, purposeful mark-making nods to the works of Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, as well as Surrealist automatic writing. The dots produced by "taps" also reference Sigmar Polke's non-mechanical productions of Benday dots.
The finger itself seems at times to be the last vestige of human power; it can vote and be dipped in purple ink to show proof; it can press the send button on an email; it can produce orgasm; it can change the channel with a remote control. From a remote location in the desert in Nevada, it can control the use of drone bomber planes in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. In a culture where so much can be accomplished while the remainder of the body is at rest in an office chair or on the couch, behind a computer or a remote control, the finger is the part that produces the action.
Such finger painting also echoes the tentative drawing of a child or the urgent images created in caves at the beginning of mankind. Georges Bataille draws parallels between these two kinds of marks as primordial, formative moments in both culture and the individual, moments that define us as human. He also suggests that the act of making the mark with the finger is necessarily both productive and destructive, in that it sullies a formerly clean surface.
Art, as one of the things that makes us most human of all, can in many ways be boiled down to this primordial gesture, this desire to touch, to communicate, to leave a mark. And yet these works, and an increase in finger-operated technologies in general, suggest a certain ambiguous concept of the haptic. On one hand, actions produce an actual tactile motion, and yet on the other, there is a level of abstraction between gesture and result, with repetition resulting in a virtually limitless amount of content. It is this simultaneous and seemingly contradictory overlaying of intimacy and distance that philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls "touching without touching."
Digital Painting (Purple Pinch), detail,Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Pinch),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Pinch),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Blue Tap),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Tap),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Tap), detail,Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Pink Swipe),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Blue Pinch),Oil and Enamel on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2011
Digital Painting (Blue Pinch),Oil on Antimicrobial Plastic on Panel, 24" x 48", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Swipe),Oil on Antimicrobial Plastic on Panel, 24" x 48", 2011
Digital Painting (Magenta Pinch, Swipe, Tap), Acrylic on Paper, 18" x 24", 2011
Digital Painting (Indigo, Magenta, Yellow, Earth Green Pinch), Oil and Acrylic on Paper, 18" x 24", 2011
Digital Painting (Teal Pinch), Acrylic on Paper, 18" x 24", 2011
Digital Painting (Teal Pinch), Acrylic on Paper, 18" x 24", 2011
Digital Painting (Lime Pinch, Pink Swipe), Acrylic on Paper, 18" x 24", 2011
Digital Painting (Pink Pinch/Movado), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Tap/Rolex), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Purple Swipe, Pinch, Tap/Hilton), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Purple Tap/Chantix), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Orange Pinch/Lyrica), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Purple Swipe/iPad), Oil on Paper, 9" x 11", 2011
Digital Painting (Yellow Pinch/New Yorker iPad App), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Lime Pinch/Chase Bank), Acrylic on Paper, 10" x 12", 2011
Digital Painting (Purple Swipe/Samsung), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Pink Tap/T-Mobile), Acrylic on Paper, 8" x 10", 2011
Digital Painting (Pink and Blue Swipe/Kindle), Acrylic on Newspaper, 11" x 13", 2011
