Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm Scott Rothkopf, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2 00:00:07,00 --> 00:00:08,00 and we're here in Wade Guyton OS
with Guyton's painting Untitled, from 2008.
What you see here are eight separate canvases
that line up down the wall
and stretch together almost fifty feet in length.
What he did to make this actually is very simple.
He had an image of stripes on his computer screen
and then he prints that on canvas
which he passes directly through the printer just like anyone
who would put paper in their printer at home.
But this printer is wider,
it's about as wide as half the size of one of these paintings.
He prints one side stripes
then flips the canvas over prints the same stripes again.
Guyton printed the same file sixteen times but in fact
none of those sixteen files, printed files are the same.
You can see that because of all the different things
that might go wrong during the process of making each of the canvases.
So for example you see fine pin striping
that occurs when an ink head gets clogged.
Just like in your home printer. Or sometimes when the bars
fall out of perpendicular alignment with the center seam,
that's because the canvas isn't moving directly
through the printer in a straight line.
Here you see where a bit of black gets printed on top of another bit of black
so it's actually quite thick there, and darker.
You also see the wheels of the printer
that pull the canvas through dragging that extra ink across the surface
in those tracks, almost like tire tracks on a road.
I think one of the really beautiful and poetic things
about this work, apart from how it just appears,
is the way it says something about technology
and our relationship to machines today.
Of course machines are made to create sameness,
to produce the same thing over and over again.
But of course things can go wrong in that process.
Like when your copy machine gets jammed,
or your printer runs out of ink.
In a way what I think what Wade's work is showing us here
is this kind of play between something that is repeating
and is made to suggest this kind of sameness,
and to use those tools, but at the same time to mis-use them,
to see things going wrong, to see a sense of possibility and openness
within that process.