John Houck
Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2x2 grid, 16 colors
2013
Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors
John Houck’s brown, sienna, and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors, features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page. Houck uses a series of self-designed software programs to create these intricate grids of color and line, riffing off of Sol LeWitt, perhaps, in a digital age. Houck takes the output of these programs and then manipulates them manually, creasing the pages of the index print, and then re-photographing them. In the end, this series of Aggregates—as the series is called—presents a synthesis of digital and analog methods that toy with the two-dimensional grid that underpins an entire digital world.
John Houck works primarily in photography and specializes in still-life vignettes. To make his works, Houck arranges an object on a sheet of paper, photographs, and prints it, then places that print back into a new composition, repeating the process again and again until arriving at an aggregate image. The layers appear to be digitally altered, but he does not utilize any post-production interventions. But Houck is not a purist by any means; he is significantly influenced by his professional experience as a computer programmer, and his artistic methodology mirrors a kind of algorithmic code. By referencing a conventional artistic genre through an iterative and contingent process, Houck offers up photography as a mode of thought.