Mark Stebbins, Glitch-alike 3, 2012, acrylic paint/ink on panel, 30.48 x 40.64, private collection.
In his artist’s statement Mr Stebbins says that he wants to depict images that exhibit ‘a refusal to exist in a single state’. He engages the eye at the same as deceiving it. What looks at first like a tapestry or map-quilt after some maleficent corruption from a dashing rainbow in fact reveals itself to be a careful construction of paint and ink. Digital rupturing and decoherence can create the most beautiful visual ephemera. Stebbins shows us this sort of ephemerality in a way that allows us to contemplate its shifting. What might be digital trash has become treasure; this flux has value in itself. The with-the-times abstraction of Stebbins’s works encourages an open gaze; let us give them their quiddity and rest our brains. DH
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