- 50 Variations
- About this work
50 Variations is a series of fifty small drawings, produced in groups of ten, with each group relative to the previous group. These gouache works on paper are based on the skeletal, or ‘wire-frame’ versions of the forms that comprise the vernacular of my paintings. Like the paintings, the works begin on the computer. In this case, the first ten drawings were derived from fragments of larger works from my 2008 exhibition, Recursions. Each subsequent group of ten involves an increase in digital manipulation–the repetition of particular elements, emphasis on certain features, and the removal or preservation of formal details.
These works are the result of a direct and immediate investigation of the relationship between the computer, the projector and the hand, restrained by the careful application of thin, painted lines in a reduced palette of warm and cool grey tones. Installed in a grid, they are meant to suggest a trickle-down effect of digital information–degrading, mutating and rebuilding over time.
I worked on this series intermittently since 2008 in my studio in San Francisco and at residencies at the Ucross Foundation and MacDowell Colony. 50 Variations was exhibited in One Thing Leads to Another: Seriality in Works on Paper at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, November 12, 2011 - February 25, 2012.