Q&A Between Gabriella Grill and Anthony Discenza

GG: I know these images are created digitally, but they look geological at the same time. To what degree do you want to simulate fossilization in organic material and to what degree are you interested in the legibility of the digital translation?

TD: Two years ago, I relocated to Western Massachusetts. An interesting geologic feature of the area is its dinosaur footprints, which are preserved in the shale throughout the region. The idea of something as ephemeral as a footprint being preserved for hundreds of millions of years is really compelling and it’s certainly informed this series—one of the elements of the images are traces of my own fingerprints. On another level, I have a larger interest in the relationship between background noise and information; the dinosaur footprints play into this in the way that they are often barely discernible with the texture of the rock itself (this is complicated by the fact that some are direct prints, while others are “overprints” and “underprints” formed by fossilized layers of sediment sitting above and below the direct print). So the idea of legibility, of signal v. noise, is very much in play here. Of course, as you point out, these are purely digitally generated images, simulated surfaces constructed from composited photographs and run through a plug-in that generates texture maps for gaming environments. The program throws out a lot of visual information in generating the simulated surface, and there’s also a conflation between digital artifacts and actual details in the photo composite. So there’s various tensions at work, between deep time/geologic space and intangible/transient digital space.

GG: Sometimes when I look at these, I see them as small impressions in clay. Other times they resemble the surface of the moon. How does scale factor into these Surface Study works? How does this sense of scale compare or relate to the way you work with scale in other areas of your practice?

TD: The works are meant to conflate scale in various ways, so there’s a tension between the sense of geologic scale and the feeling of a small fragment that’s intentional. While scale isn’t something I necessarily think about in specifically visual terms in my work, I’d say it manifests indirectly in my tendency to collide material from many different sources; to collapse hierarchies of information across disparate sources. 

GG: What are your feelings with regard to ambiguity in your work?

TD: Ambiguity is one of the main engines of artistic gestures—the indeterminacy of artworks (which can take many different forms in different artists’ practices) is a big part of why they arrest us and hold our attention. The friction of ambiguity is what makes artworks generative.

GG: Do the impressions in the images come from real objects, or are they invented?

TD: Unlike prior instantiations of these surface works whose construction relied solely on images found online, the images in this series are constructed primarily using images of real-world materials—architectural surfaces, bits of human-made objects, scans of my own fingerprints—though the elements are composited together in an unnatural way (for example, as you noted, scale is conflated/confused). There are a few digital elements floating around in there though.

GG: How do these Surface Studies figure into your practice at large (this can be interpreted in terms of process, content, or anything that comes to mind)?

TD: There’s a lot of different arms and threads I follow in my work, and many don’t make it out into the light of day for long periods of time. I make quite a bit of image-based work that I never wind up showing, or if I use it, it gets folded into a larger quasi-fictional space where it functions as part of an unreliable narrative. I also tend to go in and out of working on things; sometimes I’ll come back to something I’ve left sitting around for a few years—the Surface Studies are an instance of something I’ve returned to sporadically over long intervals. Over the entire course of my work though, there’s always been an interest in fusing together disparate things, and in layering/condensing/distilling operations involving disparate source materials.

GG: I know that in some of your other projects, you have worked with text, taking direction for the works from language, criticism and storytelling. Do you see the shapes and impressions in the Surface Studies as language? If so, what types of narratives or conversations are accessed through the images?

TD: There’s a scene in the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet where the main characters are touring the vast subterranean architecture of an alien civilization that died out millions of years ago. Since no images of these beings remain, the only thing that can be intuited about their physical form is the shape of their doorways, which are sort of a large, flattened hexagon. One character suggests that this shape likely bears a relationship to the aliens’ form in the same way that the arch relates to our own. To the extent that the traces we leave behind can be considered a form of language, the Surface Studies can be thought of as engaging with that idea.