Reese Inman uses paint to build mounds.  She drops a dollop, lets it dry, and then sands.  Then, on top of the first, a dollop of another color.  Then more sanding, cutting through the top layer, revealing glimmers of the first.  She repeats this quite focussed activity six, eight, ten times for each nubbin of color, about 1/4" in diameter, and does so for the thousands of such mounds in a meter-square painting, laid out in a grid of 10,000 centimeter-square boxes, 100 columns by 100 rows.

Some mounds become concentric rings of color, others solid circles flecked with contrasting color.  Sometimes the paint slides over and connects with an adjoining mound, and the two dots kiss and merge like a cell that hasn't quite divided.  All of this tiny, nuanced paint activity takes place with an overall constellation of interlocking patterns.  The arrangement is not random; it's thoroughly premeditated.

Inman designs on a Macintosh G4 computer, using software programs she writes to generate dot patterns.  She tinkers with the mathematics of her programs to evolve the patterns on her computer screen until she achieves a set of patterns she deems paintable.  A hard copy printout is transferred to her panel and becomes the painting's cartoon, her map for the constellation in which her mounds flicker and twinkle.

What are these paintings about?  Many viewers see suggestions of arrays of digital information or the flashing of lights in the city at night. "My work is really a reflection on the relationship between humans and computers," Inman says.  "We made them, and, like our other inventions, they can distance us from each other or bring us closer.  My musings have driven me to try to create something that is evocative of both technology and the hand."

Inman's work is on exhibition in a major survey of new abstract painting, Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park from January 20 through April 22, 2007.

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