All Systems Go, Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY, 2006

Idiomerica

(written on the occasion of "Pitches and Scripts," a 2023 exhibtion at Jennifer Baahng Gallery in NYC. January 20 -March 4, 2023)

In 1994 I began using MacIntosh computers in my art practice, first to create crudely typeset artist’s books, and then, by 2002, to create video animations, gif animations, text projects, and digital drawings. Stepping away from painting for several years, I simplified my aesthetic, paring beauty and sentimentality from it -- an adventure, perhaps, in reductive art. The rules that guided the process for the drawings on view in “Pitches and Scripts” was completely different from the ones I had been using in my painting practice, which, at the time, fused Ellsworth Kelly's monochomatic, multi-panel approach with romantic landscape imagery informed by the view from my rural childhood home.

In the self-imposed rules for the new digital drawings, aesthetic value couldn’t derive from the depicted object’s intrinsic beauty or any illusion of light, and the final output strategy, which was limited and expensive back then, had to be an integral part of the content and process. I chose to depict basic everyday objects that I had around the house -- mundane things like my coffeemaker, stretcher pliers, babyfood jars, turpentine, a video camera, the weedwacker, and my new car. If I wanted to output images at a large scale I had to print the images in tiled sections, trim them, arrange them in a grid, and glue the pieces together. Smaller pieces could be printed on old notes, stained paper, book pages, photographs, and old paintings that would be run through the inkjet without jamming. In my mind, foreshadowing my later “casualist” approach to painting, rough craft, accidents, and incorporation of damaged goods made the pieces better.

Eventually, in 2006, I returned to painting, creating a series based on tower images culled from the Internet. Today, the use of digital technology continues to enhance and deepen my outlook as a painter. Without a doubt, these early outline drawings, made in a nascent version of Adobe Illustrator, were progenitors of the hundreds of “morning drawings” that I made on my smart phone, which directly gave rise to the new paintings featured in “Next Moves” my 2022 solo show with Jennifer Baahng Gallery.

SHARON L. BUTLER

SHARON L. BUTLER