In November, I was invited to curate a show for add-art, the Firefox plugin that replaces internet ads with art. Here is my curator’s statement:

Internet ads are perfect little boxes, accurate to the pixel, placed within the precise geometric grids which delineate the contents of a website. This show replaces them with artworks exploring geometric abstraction–pushing, pulling, and reconfiguring the same mathematical language which defines the pixel-precise placement of internet ads. Cut and resized to the size of ads, these tiny artworks give us a glimpse into the diverse explorations of these artists as their pieces interact with the gridded landscapes in which they now find themselves.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright’s hand painted “X-Waves” begin with a simple grid structure but begin to warp and waver as their tiny imperfections multiply outward making perfectly imperfect patterns. Ann Alstatt’s prints explore the geometry of patterns and the language of math textbooks, cleverly juxtaposing these borrowed elements with landscapes, animals and textures. Maureen Halligan’s paintings explore the striated spaces of suburban development, mapping abstract representations of the growth of sprawl. In his “codescapes” series, Nik Hanselmann writes code which visualizes itself, resulting in dense maps which show the movement of variables and functions across the landscape of software. Pablo Manga “Linescapes” are created by layering tape culled from shops Mexico City to create complex meshes of undulating lines and colors.

And here are the images:

Andrew Jeffrey Wright: