In the basement of Atlanta’s Central Library, in his latest solo exhibition, artist Billy Clifton-Strawn is asking visitors to look closer at the smallest unit of a digital image, the pixel. His show, “Pixels at Play,” is on view in the Alcove Gallery at Atlanta Central Library through Sept. 8.
“The Glass Blowers,” on view in Billy Clifton-Strawn’s ‘Pixels at Play.’ (Courtesy of Billy Clifton-Strawn)
What does it mean to let a pixel play?
Most digital images hide their building blocks. Clifton-Strawn leaves his visible. “On its own a pixel isn’t particularly special, just a tiny square of color,” he says. “But the moment thousands of them combine, your eye starts reading a whole image out of it, and that’s the part that fascinates me.” That moment where “a bee can become a deity, or a bird can forget it was ever a bird, or a face can assemble itself out of pure frequency and walk into the room like it owns it,” Clifton-Strawn says.
The large-scale and screen pieces on display in “Pixels at Play” reflects a broader shift in Clifton-Strawn work. “My practice has been pulling me toward building fully immersive exhibitions for a while now,” he says. “I want to keep pushing past the frame entirely and build rooms people step inside of, not just walls they look at.”
Two pieces in “Pixels at Play,” “Expanses” and “The Pleasure of Coming Apart,” measure nearly 15 feet and are printed on fabric. “Those two pieces needed to command the body before they engage the mind,” Clifton-Strawn explains. “You don’t decide to be inside them, you just are.” The exhibition also includes archival pigment prints and digital screen works. Clifton-Strawn says the mix is part of an effort to show that digital art is “no less legitimate than paint on canvas.”
The weight underneath the play
Four works make up the series “Still Here,” which is a response to what Clifton-Strawn describes as “an era of rollbacks and erasures, renewed hostility toward queer people in America.” The pieces were originally made for Coca-Cola’s Pride exhibitions at the company’s corporate headquarters.
One piece, “People Are People,” makes the point directly. As Clifton-Strawn puts it: “We are all human beings, we are just people. Not categories, not threats, not problems to be legislated.” The other three pieces in the series carry their own charge: “Broken Promises” addresses commitments made to queer people and not kept; “Taking It to the Streets” renders protest as visual frequency; “We Will Rise From This” centers a phoenix.
From abstract color fields to figures suspended in light, Clifton-Strawn ‘Pixels at Play’ spans a striking range of visual worlds. (Courtesy Billy Clifton-Strawn)
Another work in the show, “The Pride We Carry,” traces Clifton-Strawn’s family across six monitors. The screens move among his parents as teenagers, himself at age 7, the concept of Liberty “fracturing under pressure,” his husband, David Clifton-Strawn, and a lion that closes the piece, in his words,” not with resolution but with resolve.” The whole thing is non-linear. “Because memory doesn’t move in a straight line, and neither does this story,” Clifton-Strawn says. The six monitors run with no fixed order, so the piece can hold “several moments at once, the way real recognition actually happens in a family.”
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Ask Clifton-Strawn why exhibit in a library, and the answer comes fast. “A library is one of the last truly public spaces we have,” he says. He’s hoping to reach “someone who wasn’t planning on encountering art that day, someone browsing the stacks who wanders into the Alcove almost by accident.” Asked what he wants a visitor to feel first, he says: “Charged up, like something in the room just handed them permission.”
“Pixels at Play” is on view through Sept. 8,, in the Alcove Gallery at Atlanta Central Library. A free, public panel discussion runs 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. July 11, followed by a reception from 2 to 4 p.m.