This work was produced using stencils, organized in pairs of differing scale, that together can produce a large volume of unique, layered monochrome prints that follow no specific pattern, yet share a strong family resemblance.
Here’s an experience that might be familiar: You spot a new business on a downtown street, or a new house in a residential neighbourhood, and struggle to remember what was there before it. It could be said that your memory has been “overwritten” by something new replacing something old. In the study of visual perception there is the related phenomenon of masking: If an image or bit of text is very briefly presented, it is easily recalled and reported, but not if it is “masked” by presentation of an immediately succeeding image, as if the latter image overwrites the former in conscious experience and memory.
While erasing calls attention to the fact that something has been erased, overwriting serves as a kind of distraction, drawing attention away from what has been overwritten and toward what has been put in its place.
Overwriting can be a political act, as when a group in power attempts to rewrite the history of what came before it and the actions it took to assume power. Overwriting is also, the digital world, a means of hiding information, as when a file is overwritten as part of a deletion process to ensure that it cannot be recovered later.
In this work, I investigate a structured process for overwriting, imagining it as a proprietary system designed to meet market demand for efficient, modular, scalable generation of nearly infinite “content” that can be used to overwrite something (everything) that came before it. This process serves two functions of effective overwriting: It can cover a surface of any size, and it distracts the viewer from what has been overwritten by prompting an ultimately fruitless search for some overall organizing pattern.
