(thinking of sending this to Art in the Halls)


Side of a Mid 50s Horsetrailer, shot this year)

9 Experiments in Post Painterly Abstraction.
A Photo Suite

These 9 photos are an attempt to figure out how to abstract documentary photography. They are searching out and recording simple examples of colour, taking away the painters touch, and making image creation an act of taxonomy. Many of the artists I thought of while working on this series, were using various examples of mechanical reproduction. The tension between the painterly touch and machines purity is ever present. Taking these images, I constantly returned to Anne Appleby, whose prints signify landscape in the simplest way: a square of pure colour like a green that reminds her of Washington, or a blue that reminds her of Verona.

These 9 photos interact with Anne Appleby’s landscapes. Her human hands I have replaced by a variety of machines. Harsh tones from neon, plastic and Formica have replaced her elegant naturalistic tones. There is none of the care of an artist. For example, her triptych, August, from 1996, with variations of yellow, has the light of a summer day, from dawn to dusk. My two yellow photos, from commercial signs, are blatantly opposed to such narrative.

Here a machine without film makes the images, a machine stores the images, a machine sends the images to a printer, which is printed by a machine and then paid for by a machine. The only task that was left for me was one of finding colours; a task centered on taxonomy, as opposed to image making.

Ironically, the imperfection of electronic files means that there is a smearing in places, and a pointillist work in others. The 9 images here are less slick and less abstracted then expected. That’s the ghost in the machine.


(i centered on appleby here because she is young, romantic, and very connected, almost uncritically, to abstracted lanscapes, in a way that really informs my more abstracted work, including several monochromes. The photos really attach to a tradtion of reductionist printmaking in the 2nd half of the 20th century Max Bill, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCraken, Bridget Riley, Kenneth Noland, Ryman and others.) (John McCraken's sculptures, Nolands Paintings, i really do mean Flavin and Judd as print artists) (there are several painters, mostly western canadian, that are on this list too, but damned if i can remember them) (I printed some work out and was really pleased how well they turned out) (I really fucking love Noland)