About

I generate imagery for paintings, drawings, and installations from glitches in Google Maps, Earth, and Street View. Glitches are precious to me - they are the moments that surveillance fails, and I invest them with the power and potential to be anything. My current project, Eye in the Sky, began with glitches found in the unrendered innards of skyscrapers. I trick the program to let me inside of spaces that evade the surveillance eye and watch the concrete coldness of New York explode into gradients, architectural lines, and seemingly random color.

What were once errors in the program become new landscapes that exist in a new dimension, which I then render faithfully in paint or pencil. I think of this as plein air painting in digital space, or a kind of observational abstraction. I study these images intensely, zooming in and out to capture every detail, and feel as though my intense attention invests these images with physicality, forcing them to exist in the real world. In my application of paint or pencil, I juxtapose soft, smooth strokes with hard, taped lines, evoking both the freedom, expansiveness, and boundaries of digital space. I want the viewer to lose themselves in open spaces, then crash into a wall. By transforming a surveillance product of an unavoidable corporation into a new world in which I can roam freely, I enact an ephemeral fantasy in which we can steal back power from the machines - both literal and structural - that rule our lives.