Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
64 × 64 inches, 64 canvases, each 8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
64 × 64 inches, 64 canvases, each 8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
64 × 64 inches, 64 canvases, each 8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
64 × 64 inches, 64 canvases, each 8 × 8 inches
Growing up I had an aunt who loved needlework and would come to visit with pattern books by Anne Orr. I'll never forget how transfixed I was the first time I peeked inside one. Anne Orr was a pioneering early twentieth-century designer, whose cross stitch patterns were widely distributed and reproduced. She was, in a sense, a proto-digital artist, mapping color onto grids, creating a kind of early open-source code. I knew instinctively that as a boy in my surroundings, liking the flowers, frills, and fruit bowls in the book's pages as much as I did was strictly off limits. Copying the illustrations into crayon at night, my brain instead transmuted the needlework instructions into illuminated consoles or spaceship control panels. Technology as plausible deniability.
Each work in this series is built around the modular logic of the cross-stitch grid, with individual canvases representing a single block, together translating tiny excerpts from Orr's designs into larger fields of color and void. The decal surfaces shift in binary, with matte color foregrounding itself over darker glossy voids, so that each image blooms or dissolves depending on lighting and viewer orientation.
What circulated from Orr's originals were reproductions of reproductions of reproductions (in many cases the original watercolors were destroyed or unavailable to be rephotographed), so the images softened with each successive iteration. I like to think of these pieces as continuing a transmission, carrying forward Orr's hand and the light that illuminated her lost original works and allowing them to extend their century-long journey.