Artist Statement

My practice begins each day by photographing whatever catches my curiosity. Those images are my only source material; I feed them through diffusion workflows I’ve built over the years, letting the machines lead the iterations I later curate into series. What holds me is the exchange between what I intend and what the machines return. What can a source image become when it’s drawn out through noise?

I draw on Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, and the West Coast Light and Space movement — not to extend any one of them, but to press their concerns against each other. The Conceptualists’ claim that the procedure can be the work is literal here: I build the system and let it run.

I came to this from printmaking, and its logic still governs the work — states, proofs, a plate, an edition. The machines generate the states; I pull the ones worth keeping. The plate is literal: pixel-saturated images printed on aluminum that appear to float just off the wall.

Abstract Expressionism held concerns for me of form and non-form; Light and Space’s was light itself. That light shifts from series to series — saturated pigment in some, dark and low-contrast in others. Every image here began as something I walked past and noticed. What is created is neither that thing nor the machine’s interpretation of it, but the record of the negotiation between chance and intent.

— Will Martin