Blue

Chicago-based painter Scott Short has a very simple, yet highly refined method of arriving at his mesmerizing abstract compositions. He places a piece of colored construction paper on the scanning bed of a black-and-white photocopier and makes a photocopy. Then he makes a photocopy of that photocopy. He repeats the process, moving one generation further from his original each time, not quite ad infinitum, but at least a few hundred times.

The resulting image renders the original monochrome of the construction paper an arresting field of intricately textured black-and-white static. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition of Short’s work at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Blue presents all the steps involved in the creation of a single piece of this art. In its reconstruction of Short’s method of composition, Blue is essentially an artist's workbook, explanatory yet hypnotic, and it will appeal to all fans of abstract contemporary art.