Untitled
2008

The columns of stacked black bars in this work by Wade Guyton were printed, not by hand, but by an Epson UltraChrome Inkjet printer. In many of his works, including this one, Guyton folds swathes of canvas in half and feeds them through the printer multiple times, intentionally creating errors that show up in the final product, such as the off-center matching of the bars and the jittery white lines where the printer ink never stuck to the canvas. The bars were created on Microsoft Word software through extremely simple means. When viewed in this expansive—almost fifty-foot long—canvas, they call to mind film strips, stacked windows in a computer monitor, or a dense computer code. With their wobbly patterning and surface errors, however, the mechanically-produced bars are tinged with an almost human sense of fallibility and pathos.