No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
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.
1070 Homer Street,
Vancouver, BC, V6B 2W9, Canada
T. 604.737.3969
E. [email protected]
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
William Betts bold new color abstract paintings create a harmonious balance marrying freeform veils of color with the structures imposed by the technology and process. Until this series, Betts’ work has been photographically based mediated through the filters of technology and process. For these works, Betts takes a different approach, creating abstract color compositions that he then manipulates through a set of filters and tools to rationalize the composition and apply a cohesive structure to the work. By using a highly reduced color palette and ordered dithering to simulate the color nuances in the original image, Betts establishes forced constraints that embrace and highlight the technology used to realize his vision while significantly complicating the creative process. The ordered dithering used to represent the color transitions provides an interesting aesthetic mediation that is both reminiscent of a specific time in image processing and imparts a regularity that contrasts the freeform nature of the image itself. Ironically, without an image to hide mistakes and imperfections, the process requires constant monitoring and adjustment by the artist bordering on obsessive. The resulting work achieves a new aesthetic highlighting both the organic and spontaneous origins and its mechanized and controlled realization.
Betts is using complex industrial processes to create paintings that reflect the possibilities for an analog medium in a digital age. These paintings are executed in an elaborate and time consuming proprietary technique that Betts developed for applying small drops of paint with a high degree of accuracy utilizing linear motion technology and my on proprietary software he developed specifically for this purpose. Each painting has between Thirty-Six and Fifty-Eight Thousand individually applied drops of paint with each drop representing a single pixel from the source image.
1070 Homer Street,
Vancouver, BC, V6B 2W9, Canada
T. 604.737.3969
E. [email protected]