Look, See

The Green Line | Powelton announces “Five Pieces,” new work by Oakland, California artist Chris Ashley.
“Five Pieces” opens May 11 and ends on July 6, 2007. A reception will take place on Friday, June 2, 6-9:00 pm.
The Green Line | Powelton is located at 3649 Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia.

The Green Line | Powelton presents “Five Pieces,” an exhibition of recent works by Oakland, California artist Chris Ashley. In addition to making paintings, Ashley also makes images on the computer using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. Using HTML tables consisting of colored cells in rows and columns, Ashley makes one image each day and posts it on his weblog (http://chrisashley.net/weblog/).

All of the images presented in this exhibition originated as web-based images on his weblog. These inkjet prints are actually fifth generation images; they originate as code; are rendered as an image by the web browser; are displayed on a browser; are screen captured and saved as a digital file; and then are printed. Images made daily over the past five years for the web are reused as printed objects installed on a wall.

“Five Pieces” consists of five works. Day After Day and Notches both comprise multiple inkjet prints on paper hung unframed on the wall, the former thirty two prints, and the latter twenty one. The remaining three pieces in the show— Untitled (Blue & Green), Untitled (Pink), Untitled (Yellow & Green) — are single inkjet prints on transparency hung between two pieces of acrylic. All five of the pieces are made in limited editions of ten.

Ashley tends to work in series and themes, resulting in bodies of work that are typically a month long. In addition to making images that are composed and dynamic, the accumulation of images over time, and the relationship between images in series are important to the overall meaning of the work. Despite the limitation of working with HTML tables— an inherently grid-based medium that is insistently flat and hard-edged — he manages to create images with a great deal of variety and expression.