by Ben Blatt
My recent watercolor paintings focus on enclosures set in abandoned architectural spaces. Bell jars, fountains, terrariums, monuments, and medallions serve as incubators for evocative botanical worlds. In these spaces I create safe houses for propagation. My controlled environments are ideal for growing and preserving a climate. Through these settings, notions of paradox are explored: upside down architecture over-waters plants; leaves open to receive foreign crystalline-mechanical structures; water is both frozen and flowing; carved stone crawls with veins, vast mountain ranges are somehow contained. Life overtakes life, perpetuating cycles of life and death. I choose to work primarily with the patient medium of watercolor, allowing subtle atmospheric life to fade in and out of precious worlds within worlds. I can render and blur with subsequent layers to create a feeling of memory and nostalgia. Although I mine past ideals of art history (Rococo, Symbolism, Wunderkammen, Romanticism, etc.) I intentionally use a palette that suggests a contemporary lens: shifts in CMYK colors evoke digital misprints, psychedelic patterns destabilize centralized imagery and color fields crack open spontaneously. Modern imaging technology provides me with patterns unknown before the last twenty years. Cell structures based on scans from electron microscopes act as cobblestone. Shapes and patterns disconnect from form, creating frictions in receding perspective. I try to entangle within all the detail and visual delight, a sense of reality slipping away, opening floodgates of the subconscious. My hope is that the intimate images induce a desire to climb within, to preserve what memories remain, before they fade away.
by James Bills
The connection between the inner mind and the outer world inspires me. In my latest work, I am exploring this relationship within architectural drafting and information visualization techniques. In architectural renderings, ideas are transferred to paper in detail, laying the ground work for an object’s construction in the real world. Information visualization, on the other hand, collects data from the real world, forming a visual schematic that is subject to analysis and interpretation. There is a symbiosis between what is imagined and what is reality, each feeding the other and becoming dependent on the other’s existence.
Golden Parachutes, my latest drawings, refer to the nonsensical machinations that came to light in the recent recession. The huge payouts executives received when their companies failed reveal some of the greed and back room dealing that led to the downturn. Our economy is this large, uncontrollable system filled with both random acts of fate as well as focused, immoral manipulations. Like everyone, I desired a simple explanation, and so I asked myself if there was a graph which could explain the situation, what would it look like it? Using a column chart format, I first graphed a set of completely random values generated by polyhedral dice. The columns are then colored according to how many other columns they overlap, as if transparent, creating different depths and densities marked by color. Golden Parachutes RXRXR, the first drawing, is based upon a set of data, but since this data was generated by chance, the ability to create a straightforward, analysis of the graph is negated. You can see a system at work, but you can’t easily explain how or why. The rest of the drawings are variations to this system, setting some dimensions constant and keeping others random. The whole series alludes to the varying levels of order, chaos, transparency, and bankruptcy we are experiencing in this economy.
