ARTISTS:

William Betts
Leslie Furlong
April Gertler
Eric Robert Parnes
David Andrew Sitek
Phillip Thomas
Walter Tschinkel
Reuben Wu

selected work
exhibitions
biography

William Betts’s series of pixilated paintings depicts low resolution images, not unlike film stills of anonymous figures, taken from found video and footage shot by the artist. In one work, the viewer immediately recognizes an ominous character as alarming—the result of our own conditioned responses through heuristic processing. The artist engages the topic of surveillance by the transformative act of enhancing staged or seemingly staged images into tensionfilledvignettes. The egoless framing of the source-video stills is stunningly neutral. The choice involved in selecting the “final” image is the lone act of specific intentionality in the entire process. Betts is a scientist, and his intent depends on experimentation that revolves around a plausible thesis.
His proof —the power of randomness— is just that: a proof,scientific and neutral. Never really resolved, never really satisfied, Betts knows of the banality of evil and exploits its endless utility to a curious endgame.he sociological and philosophical implications of surveillance in contemporary society with this series of paintings that are based on found and staged surveillance and come from a variety of sources. With few specific visual clues other than the time stamp, the work relies on a unique perspective and presents ambiguity and anonymity as its subject to draw the viewer into a vague and questioning environment. www.williambetts.com

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