Exhibition: Lossiness

Type: Solo
Venue: VisArts
Address: Rockville, MD, USA
Dates: Sep 3rd, 2021—Oct 17th, 2021
Link: More Info

Artist's Statement

Spot a few rabbits in a row and you’ve got yourself an omen, a philosophy or a phobia. Humans are pattern-matching beasts.

Well—”matching” isn’t a strong enough word. We are pattern-forging creatures; pattern smashers, pattern steamrollers, nuclear atom-crushing pattern rippers, imposing hallucinatory structures on a soup of utterly incorrolatable flotsam. Any stray sparks in the void are eligible for greater meaning; before long we’ve crashed together Vegas in the night.

I believe you could describe a lot of contemporary life in this way: good-intentioned folks skimming the garbage patch, and willing their scoopfuls to become perfect pearls. Or am I just stringing together my own pattern?

In Lossiness, I aim to explore the edges of perceptibility. Through selective destruction, warping and obscuring, I hope to guide viewers through their own pattern-matching hardware.

The word “lossiness” refers to a compression technique. We don’t really need every detail of every picture, right? Toss out some lesser-noticed pixels: you’ve got a JPEG. Do this 60 times a second, that’s YouTube. And we’re happy to patch in the gaps, building our own mini-deepfakes, tickling 90% of the same neurons because we didn’t have quite enough resources for the real thing. No matter—the pattern came through.

—Chris Combs