Description
Travess Smalley (American, b. 1986, Huntington, West Virginia) is a Providence-based artist, trained at Cooper Union and RISD, who moves between code, print, textile, and drawing, using custom scripts he has described as 'seeds of chance' to generate images balancing randomness and rule. This work belongs to his March 2023 series of pen-plotter foil drawings, whose file-name titles record the date and iteration of an ongoing generative process; related drawings such as '33_Plotter_Foil_Drawing_03_17_23_01.bmp' were shown in 'Number colors burn randomly' at Foxy Production, New York (2023). Robotically drawn by a computerized pen plotter, the intimate foil drawings hold mechanical production in tension with the suggestion of the hand-drawn line. Smalley has also shown at Higher Pictures, the International Center of Photography, and galleries in North America and France.