Travess Smalley @Foxy Production

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 large scale color works (7 single images and 1 diptych), hung unframed and unmatted against white walls in the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are UV coated digital pigment prints mounted on aluminum, made in 2015. Each panel is sized 82×60, and all of the works are unique. The show also includes a set of artist’s books (5 volumes, containing a total of 1384 images/drawings); the books were made in 2015 and come in an edition of 10+2AP. Copies of a short story by the artist, entitled Bloom, are available for free at the gallery desk. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Travess Smalley’s new show starts with a short story. Set in the near but recognizable future where centralized cloud storage has become ubiquitous, it tells the vaguely dystopian tale of an anonymous man struggling as a data holdout, storing his own digital self on vintage hardware and debugging the deteriorations and corruptions inherent in generations of technology transfer and upkeep. His newest storage investment is a “Bloom”, a bio-storage innovation that is fed by data, built of leaves carrying backups of backups. As the narrative closes, we see the man pondering the immensity of the data (and personal memories) on stored on his Bloom, the impossibility of even comprehending it all, and then taking out a pen and making a simple line sketch of the flower, the drawing an abstraction of the reality, but still a satisfying representation.

With this context in mind, Smalley’s recent flower pictures have a clearer resonance. There are no actual flowers anywhere on view here – no nature, no scents, no bursting bouquets, and no dewy petals. Instead, Smalley offers us a future floral reality, where a blossom is the downstream data output of multiple layers of distortion. His smart pictures are more like ideas of flowers, abstractions that have been over processed to the point that they are no longer entirely floral. They’ve become visual echoes, or memories, or just digital noise.

Smalley’s images feel like iterative exercises in purposeful misdirection. Starting with a vase full of artificial flowers on a windowsill, he jumps through seemingly endless layers of process improvisations – physical overpainting of the fake flowers themselves, photography, rephotography, scanning (often misaligned), photocopying, Photoshop manipulation/cropping, color tweaking, digital drawing and mark making – turning each image into a distorted version of the now distantly original idea. Floral outlines are digitally traced, turned, and piled on top of each other (like a nest of outlines), colors are savagely warped and inverted, and images are digitally smeared into sweeps of eye popping dissonance, every step taking us further and further away from the starting point. The edges of the images are often left offset like partial black framing, Smalley’s scanning and rescanning process laid bare as reminder of the transformations that have taken place.

A quick flip through his accompanying artist’s book(s) is overwhelming – he has made literally hundreds of these floral works/”drawings”, each one a manic synthesis of something else; it’s like his reconstructive artistic process has gone into an open exponential loop, iteratively assembling and reimagining an infinite set of combinations and steps. As an embodiment of Smalley’s impending data overload scenario, it is unsettlingly persuasive; as individual artworks, quite a few are stunningly original.

Like many of the photocopy and Xerox art pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, Smalley is using his scanner (and a bevy of other technological tools) to introduce distortion, repetition, and feedback into the photographic system, undermining its fidelity and extending its aesthetics. In the end, his images are like mind-bending metaflower artifacts – not the blossoms themselves anymore, but intense visualizations of the cacophony of data that now represents and categorizes them in our digital world.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced at $16000 for the single images and $28000 for the diptych; the set of artist’s books is $950. Smalley’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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Read more about: Travess Smalley, Foxy Production

One comment

  1. Janet /

    “Bloom” can also be read on the artist’s website.

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JTF (just the facts): Published in 2023 by Fw:Books (here). Softcover, 240 x 280 mm, 128 pages, with 133 black-and-white reproductions. Includes an essay by the artist. (Cover and spread ... Read on.

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