Working out what you want to create, and what you want it to mean, if anything, are two of the many problems that all artists have to wrestle with. (Problems being the operative word.)
When you are able to solve these problems, to any extent, you have developed a process. Every artist has a process, whether they can explain it or not. Enter: Jason Hoylman. He can explain his process with such detail that my head started to pixilate.
Born in Oklahoma and living in Texas for three years, Jason moved to Baltimore in 1994. After years in and out of school, studying a large array of art mediums, and “generally fucking around” he finally received his undergraduate degree from MICA. Fascinated by math theory, but not good at math, he began formulating ideas for a series of books he calls the Quantum Library, several volumes of books with hundreds of pages of numbers in a grid like format.
“There is a lot of information to see. Whether the numbers mean something or not, there is a beautiful visual aesthetic that occurs,” Jason explains.”It is a way to physically experience entropy. Let’s say on one of these pages you pull away, visually, the number 2. It is still there working, but the visual absence creates a visual pattern. Constellations in a way. Points of reference.” These books and collages led him to the square root of 2, which is endless, and the Necker Cube.
