This online exhibition features the work of eight artists who paint with the computer and show their work on the internet.

Laura Brothers

Laura Brothers' work takes the form of pixel-perfect compositions uploaded serially to her feed on the publishing platform LiveJournal.

She has been posting in this way since 2007. Sometimes the gap between posts is a couple weeks or even a few months, punctuated by several new works uploaded at once. In its lifespan, the blog has has inspired many other artists. For example, Andrej Ujhazy—whose work is also included in "Brushes"—cites her as a key influence, as does artist Robert Lorayn of Computers Club.

Brothers blogs under the pseudonym "out_4_pizza," a handle that reflects the "casual whim" that sparked her project—she initially started her LiveJournal with the intention of posting only a single entry, but the platform soon became a central aspect of her practice. In a 2012 interview, Brothers described the way she approaches this exhibition context:

I assume that the way in which my work is normally viewed is through the action of scrolling. You're on a computer and you are gliding the images in succession past your gaze. I liken this to a sort of super slow motion film strip. It's a way of storytelling. For a post, each individual image is viewed in relation to the one that comes before it and the one that follows. Meanwhile, they are all sort of floating in an endless black space. There's no real clear-cut definition between the images in this context. So to me, within each post, each distinct image is really part of the same piece; the same story.

Posts also have a relationship with one another; elements are recycled and similar themes explored from one to the next. There is consistency across the body of work as a whole: the vertical layout and black background of the blog, allusions to comics, and the pixel-perfect style in which seemingly solid colors are often rendered as half-tone or checkerboard patterns. This latter trait means that Brothers' work often creates a moiré effect as the viewer scrolls; although she describes this as an unintentional byproduct of her visual style—she cites Lichtenstein as a key influence. However, the visual effect is destroyed when images are resized or compressed, and Brother describes the use of LiveJournal as being particularly important because it's among the few publishing platforms that doesn't transform uploaded images in this fashion. The specific relationship between these pixelated patterns and the screen is also difficult to translate to printed form, making the computer in many ways the best context for this work.

Despite the consistency in Brothers' body of work, distinct phases have emerged; for the past year—beginning with the post "Maloo-Ed" (7 August 2014)—Brothers' work has often involved solid color backgrounds (actually composed of half-tones and checkerboards) with gestural marks superimposed on them.

The marks are sometimes abstract scribbles that call to mind automatic drawing; at other times, they loosely describe interior spaces, as in "Deux Blue." Like all of Brothers' works, the marks were made using the computer mouse as input device, rather than the Wacom tablet.

The works in "Deux Blue" bring painting into conversation from multiple perspectives. They include cartoon-style images of abstract paintings leaning against a wall, as if during installation, overlaid with a striated field of blue that calls attention to the grid-oriented aesthetics of the screen, interacting dynamically with more painterly brushstrokes.

A subsequent post, "HENRY HAUNTED" (21 August 2014) shifts the architectural setting from miminal gallery to a crumbling ruin. In HENRYBLUEROOM.png the setting is depicted in an inset window in the composition against a blue background covered with an all-over composition of scribbled marks.

"RUSSHHOUR" (also 21 August 2014) builds on the all-over composition, doing away with the architectural elements. Despite being loose and gestural, the marks are copied and pasted across the composition, highlighting an interplay between the work as an index of Brothers' manual input and as an index of computational processes.

Unsettling, cartoon-like figures enter the compositions in "WHAT'S LEFT" (16 October 2014).

With "FOR THE BIRDS" (21 May 2015), the all-over gestural composition begins to resolve into figuration—specifically a desert landscape populated by tumbleweeds and a figure reminiscent of the roadrunner.

And "SOUP'S ON" (15 June 2015) brings together a number of these threads, introducing a kind of geometric architectural motif that resembles the graphics from a late-1980s videogame. A wide-eyed, expectant figure stands in front of a painting that is inset with a pattern resembles the desert landscapes of "FOR THE BIRDS," in front of a series of tracks in the ground. Behind it, there is a loose evocation of the Road Runner. Altogether, the composition suggests a narrative, as if the Road Runner had run up to and crashed through the painting, leaving a bird-sized hole in it, through which the desert can be glimpsed.

The original Road Runner cartoons were drawn by the great Chuck Jones, the artist who introduced a cross-dressing rabbit into World War II-era American pop culture. Among Jones' written rules for the series were that the Road Runner could never be caught, and that the audience's sympathy must always remain with the coyote, seemingly the aggressor. The Road Runner was the impossible object of desire. And as Jones wrote in rule #3, a rule which may have a certain resonance with Brothers' years-long LiveJournal practice: "The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic."

See Brothers' full LiveJournal here.