An analogue lens on the digital:  How might insistently material interactions across media widen our imaginations of virtual substance and help substantiate the virtual?  

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A painter in a post-medium framework, my work often consists of acts of translation—visual and material transformations, played out in the darkroom, studio or printshop.  What seems most unorthodox in my work is actually trust in painting’s capaciousness and the conviction that to carry a torch for painting may mean stepping outside of its normal boundaries. In particular my “painting” of the past few years has slipped beneath the surface of photography, alongside increasingly permeable and multi-track moving image installations.  Simple concepts like light (light traveling distance or passing through), mark-making (both aleatory and signifying), tactility and surface are currents running between these forms.  Together they build a conversation about media, through media, but firmly grounded in the studio.  

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For this talk, I will build on an earlier paper, “Thread, Pixel, Grain” which attempted to parse materials from medium.  Loosely starting with the concept of the matrixial as coined by Bracha Ettinger and later read through a short text by Carol Armstrong, I will draw out some examples that emerge in practice around the very fabric of images.  I mean (among others) permeability; reversibility; structural and perceptual quanta; the substance of light and the surefootedness of vision.  Far from a coherent theory, these are a series of open questions that arise through making—whether within the logic of studio, the needs of its materials, or in generative accidents and revelations.