Bio

Robert Stratton was born in 1960 in Cali, Colombia, to American ex- pat parents and moved with them around the world (Ecuador, Peru, the US, the Philippines, Canada, Guatemala, Nigeria, Thailand) before settling in for a long stretch as an adult in New York City. In NYC he got an MFA in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts, where he also worked for numerous years as an instructor. He also started numerous design and technology companies during this time in NYC, including “dot com” interactive agency Rare Medium, and the technology-themed bar Remote Lounge. In 2011 he returned to Thailand with his own family as a partner in Sensacell Inc, which manufactures an interactive lighting system. His work at Sensacell involves navigating the cross-section of art, design, and interactive programming, which transitions nicely into the skills used to make this current body of work. Robert also restarted his art career in Bangkok, where he had a series of successful shows of his abstract digital photography. In this work, he would use software he wrote to radically modify cityscapes he photographed to amplify the textures, colors, and chaotic juxtapositions of city life in Bangkok. When he moved back to the US in 2019, he proceeded to build a new body of work that uses the same processes and software to manipulate close-up photographs he took of the distinctive flora of his new Southern California home.

Statement

To create this work I take photographs, usually macroscopic images of cacti and succulents local to my new home in Southern California, then process them using software that I wrote. After the images are extensively manipulated using this procedure, the images are printed on high-end pigment dye printers on archival, heavyweight, cotton rag paper.

My software works by scaling, rotating, and folding different parts of the original image into intricate “kaleidoscopic” symmetries using an iterative process that also randomizes the parameters fed to the algorithm. A feedback loop increasingly re-works the image, so that the original photograph becomes increasingly fractured by the process. At the core of the work is a tension between the objective reality of the photographic source and the abstracted patterns emerging from the re-shuffled shapes, colors, and textures that develop in the increasingly processed versions of the source photograph. The resulting tensions in the completed works - between visual order and disorder, intention and randomness, abstract pattern versus photographic document – all compound to give them their unique character.