Travess Smalley, 2023 
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The work begins with a photograph, from a late summer walk in Caratunk Wildlife Preserve in Massachusetts. Through the pandemic, Smalley spent the majority of his studio time on the screen, focused on a drawing or a print. Caratunk is his 20 minute walk in nature, where he “starts to see all the symmetries and complexities of life,” his eyes adjusting to natural light. The final image suggests an in-between state of vision, a landscape that refuses the eye tidy resolution. Smalley’s practice draws on emergent patterns, generative tactics, and methods of repetition, to surface life cycles. Here, the original photograph is processed through actions in Photoshop, and through JavaScript, to make a composite of multiple distinct digitizings and recolorings of the image, in various ranges of vibrant chromatic RGB values. Layering these versions creates a new work, emergent, partially planned - but impossible to see before final render.