In this exhibition, artists Dave Kemp, Thelma Rosner, Mark Stebbins, and Shaheer Zazai examine how pixels are used as aesthetic material and metaphors for meaning. Pixels are small squares of colour that form the building blocks of digital images. When combined in a pattern with other pixels, they produce a complete picture. Despite its origins in digital screens, the word pixel now applies to non-digital imagery as well, and can be found in commercial advertising, interior design, fashion, architecture, and visual art. Working primarily in photography, painting, craft, and digital media, the artists in this exhibition approach pixels as visual devices to question our lived reality and experience of the world. While digital technology creeps toward higher forms of resolution, for instance 4k and 5k screen displays, these artists do otherwise—they break down pixilation to its essence, as a series of blocks, grids, or patterns, and employ these to create new works that appear like other media. In doing so, they bridge the divide between abstract painting and HD digital imagery, analog photography and digital photography, rug hooking and digital painting, and mass-produced objects and handicraft. Their work proposes different methods of how images structure memory, time, and place—they articulate the importance of what we look at and how we look at it in a society deeply consumed by pictures.

Little Squares: The Pixel as Material and Metaphor

18 January — 15 March, 2020