A series of screen prints exploring how a core set of shapes can be recombined and adjoined to create modular structures varying in size and density.
This line of work has its origins in a painting I made that consisted of a 30 by 22 grid of square cells, each filled with layers of thinned acrylic paint in the process colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. A digital photo of the painting was divided into a set of 660 small, grainy square images, corresponding to each of the cells in the original grid. Each image was then further separated into three color channels (cyan, magenta, and yellow), producing a core set of nearly 2000 cells. These source cells have continuous tone, from white through gray to black, indicating how much of the associated color (C, M, Y) is present in a given location within the cell. This collection of cells serve as building blocks, akin to an “alphabet” of forms, out of which a practically unlimited number of constructions can be created. One inspiration for this work is the Gray Alphabets painting and prints by Jasper Johns.
This project employs different options for bitmapping a cell, that is, replacing the original continuous tone with a set of white pixels and black pixels only. The work shown here uses two bitmapping processes as means of representing the cell’s content or form. One process involves the halftone dot that is common to commercial printing. This process was carried out by a computer program. The other process simplifies the cell’s content into a hard-edged form with smoothly curved edges. This process was done by hand drawing (on an iPad). At present, because it is more time consuming, the latter process has been completed only for a subset of the nearly 2000 cells constituting the core set.
The individual, bitmapped cells can be combined and nested into larger, more complex modular forms. For the work shown here, randomly selected sets of cells were arranged into three grids of 18 by 9 cells each. Each grid was transferred to a screen for printing. Grids can be superimposed on top of one another and printed, for example, in different colors; they can also be printed side by side on the sheet to create larger grids. In this manner, the core set of forms multiplies and becomes embedded in increasingly complex and dense arrangements.
