Value Added Tax

The series works to showcase its unseen production and pricing mechanisms. Repeating images executed in different mediums — pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, oil, ordered screenprint, artist screenprint, inkjet print and giclee print — reveal their material costs and the required added value to reach their uniform sale price. The initial image, serving as a constant modus, sets the following two units in motion, which describe the object, firstly as an artist’s financial investment, and secondly as a potential return on investment within the art market.

The content of the image is effectively disregarded, once it is visually implemented into its financialized conditions, generating a novel expression by depicting this process. Through this system the artwork is reduced to its financial makeup, rendering it only as earning potential and depicting its reification. As the sequence of mediums moves towards ever greater automation, the benefits of mechanizing production, and alienating ones-self from their work is disclosed, concluding with immaculate and infinitely replicable digital prints.

010058211020

The series unveils invisible aspects of technical images and the discrepancies between their front-facing facades and their back-end structures. All motives are adapted to and respond to their constant physical format by altering the quantity and size of present elements, or the amount of encoded content within the works. The series serves to highlight the sheer technical complexity hidden behind the insignificant, so ubiquitous as to seem almost banal.

010058211020 begins with a one-to-one data relationship between vector images and their code. Abstract minimal images are made technologically un-abstract by being repeated in their textual form as code. The same is done with .png images, whose textual size is orders of magnitude larger; this aspect is addressed in the titles of the works, which describe the relationship between the crop of the appropriated image and the “crop” of its code. The disparity in size between the whole and the sample is further elaborated on in the continuing triptychs, which, by scanning a portion film as it plays, calcify it into a still image. Extending this concept further, the final set of two triptychs captures a portion of an artistic encoding of the year 1968, which is, by using the same scanning process, transcoded to 10 minutes of the entire year.