William Betts work has always maintained a strong basis in photography although not necessarily as complete images but as sets of information that can be decontextualized and manipulated independently. His work is an investigation of the role of video and digital photography as documentation and structurally as an organized collection data. Using industrial production methods to achieve a level of precision that allows him to carefully manipulate and corrupt specific aspects of this structure to achieve my desired result. Although at first glance the abstract line paintings and the mirror images in the show have little in common, they both share a photographic legacy and production process that ties them together with all of my work.

Betts is making use of a complex industrial processes to create paintings reflecting the possibilities for an analog medium in a digital age. His work is typically based on photographic material mediated through technology and process. Using images as data sets to be examined, sampled, re-contextualized, manipulated and represented. Betts has always been less interested in content and more concerned with the structural and social aspects of the image. His practice is non-linear and he works on several bodies of work and techniques concurrently. They inform each other and also help clarify each other.

In this series, Betts is showing, three groups that he has worked on over the past several years. Although one group of paintings is representation and the other two are abstract, they share a common conceptual and technical foundation. All of the paintings on panel (line paintings) in this series are a continuation of a body of work that started in 2004 where he took single pixel row samples and extruded them to arrive at purely abstract linear images. The resulting images retain the natural rhythm of the source while removing all representative information. The paintings in this show are from a single image Betts has worked with in several forms most recently reducing it to pure black and white and extruding several samples at various points in the image.