Stance
I always struggled with specificity in my work. Depth has never necessitated detail. It’s why I’m drawn to asemic writing - the rhythm of mark making without the goal of textual legibility. The works in Stance follow the same gestural rhythm - a purposeful lack of specificity that implies something universal. Here, the abstraction is applied to human form.
The first iterations of the images in Stance lived as photos in my phone 2012-2026. They began with hard outlines, recognizable details, cellphone resolution, and a specificity of person and place that I didn't create but rather found in the world.
I chose the candid, figural images from a camera roll of 180,000 photos and manipulated them into an asemic abstraction, stripping their legibility until only a fleeting
recognition remained of humans in their habitats. First, the images went through Checker Cam, a filter that pixelates and re-colors into a checkerboard pattern, so that no abutting squares are the same color. This self-created tool allows for a layering of multiple sizes, distinguishing between foreground and background — a cubist fracturing of a single plane into many — to produce a range of legibility within each image.
The images then went through a second self-built tool, the Ascii Cam, a custom-input ascii filter. Translating the already-manipulated compositions to text further abstracts the forms while authoring a technically legible but optically textural meditation on the spectrum from abstraction to specificity. At the same time, the colored text replaces the hard forms beneath and, in all its sharp binary glory, renders an image that feels almost painterly, a gesture.
all 16 still works
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