Nineteenth-century advances in optics and pigment technology gave us the ability to capture and reproduce a full range of color using only three photoreceptors or pigments - without this three-color (RGB/CMY) system, color photography and film, television, compression of digital images and video, and the Internet as we know it would not be possible.
In order to work directly with the red, green, and blue information encoded in digital source images, I paint with only cyan, magenta, and yellow paint, applied in successive transparent layers. By interfering with the normal functioning of the three-color system - selectively displacing, distorting, and deleting information - I bring the color system itself to the foreground, exposing its limitations and undermining its claim to represent reality while revealing new formal possibilities and layers of meaning.
I use the three-color system as an analogy for the systematization of knowledge in general: systematic knowledge leads to new technologies that expand our horizon but also create new opportunities for power and domination. The pre-scientific understanding of phenomena is lost forever once knowledge of them is systematized, and this loss of mystery constitutes an impoverishment of our experience. Three-color images' ability accurately to represent reality is taken for granted but is not unproblematic; the same can be said of our brains' particular way of organizing sensory input into a coherent perception. As more of our understanding of the world is systematized, things that fall outside these systems are ignored, discounted, and forgotten. The subversive, revolutionary agent that overturns any system must work within the system on its own terms.
