Mike Womack's research focus is on drawing and painting media, objects, conceptual practices, and installations made from plain materials, which in turn make images. The imagery reflects, projects, or distorts either the objects that create the images in the first place, or their constituent materials. Using mirrors, lights, and found materials, I create a rudimentary bitmapping of data. This primitive and low-tech approach replicates the complexity of electronics, like a cathode ray tube or an integrated circuit, with the make shift means of the everyday. Compounded blips of light and color attempt to create a raster image similar to that transmitted in a computer or a television. The inherent inability of mechanical-era ingenuity to simulate atomic-era technology results in an abstraction of futility. The images created by the objects Womack makes are a fingerprint of desire, a desire of a material to be something more than its process will allow.
keywords
Drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, digital media, and conceptual art practices
