Artist Statement

The seminal work behind my recent interest in pixilation was a large scale drawing from 2003. The image was a confrontational representation of a television turned off, rendered realistically in charcoal. It was primarily a meditative investigation and a commentary on the power and significance of the television in our culture. My first work to explore the pixel itself as the primary subject matter was an image of raging fire and billowing smoke. This drawing was in response to the ambiguity of television news as war broke out in Iraq. Pixilation has been the prominent content of my work ever since. It has evolved into a symbol for the degradation of the relationship between humanity and nature, particularly in our culture. Through their rigid, cold artificiality and their fragmentation of reality, pixels convey the ideas of technology, materialism, the media, pollution, and artifice in general.

Currently I work with pixel fields intended to communicate an emotive quality. The static is an abstraction, reduced from a feeling that as a society, we are constantly assaulted and manipulated by the consumer landscape we inhabit. Aside from this intended meaning, the textures of the pixel fields can be seen as indicating the expansion of this overbearing presence or its failure and decay. This invites a compelling range of opportunities for interpretation.

My recent drawings are experiments in altering the form of the pixels into lines and segments of long strip formats, derived from the process of rendering pixels by hand. Through printmaking, I plan to continue with these investigations as well as enhancing the processes I utilize to create a diverse body of pixel fields.

Joel Berry