Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors

2013 - Photography (Photography)

John Houck

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John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page. Houck uses a series of self-designed software programs to create these intricate grids of color and line, riffing off of Sol LeWitt, perhaps, in a digital age. Houck takes the output of these programs and then manipulates them manually, creasing the pages of the index print, and then re-photographing them. In the end, this series of Aggregates—as the series is called—presents a synthesis of digital and analogue methods that toy with the 2-dimensional grid that underpins an entire digital world.

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An MFA graduate from UCLA, John Houck works primarily in the medium of photography and specializes in still-life vignettes. To make his works, Houck arranges an object on a sheet of paper, photographs, and prints it, then places that print back into a new composition, repeating the process again and again until arriving at an aggregate image. The layers appear to be digitally altered, but he does not utilize any postproduction interventions. But Houck is not a purist by any means; he is significantly influenced by his professional experience as a computer programmer, and his artistic methodology mirrors a kind of algorithmic code. By referencing a conventional artistic genre through an iterative and contingent process, Houck offers up photography as a mode of thought.

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Colors:

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• binary_star.n.01
• digital.a.01
• system.n.01
• grid.n.01
• layer.v.01
• aggregate.n.03
• abstract versus figurative art
• color photography
• figurative art
• language
• american