Karen Hochman Brown
Digital Playground
TAG Gallery
January 19 - February 12, 2022
Artist Statement:
Being too young and possibly too sheltered as a child to actually be a hippie, I was still drawn to the visual esthetic of the bright colors and swirling shapes of psychedelic and op-art as well as their predecessors of geometric abstraction. Pop culture showed me Peter Max with his bright colors and bold shapes. Forays into the library introduced me to the geometric constructions and spatial distortions of Victor Vasarely. Later, I found Agnes Martin’s repetitive meditations.
High school geometry introduced me to the compass as a tool to create with precision, if only I had the discipline to keep my work neat enough to satisfy my perfectionist tendencies. A decade later, with the advent of the Macintosh computer, its accessible interface and immediate accuracy, I found my artist tool.
The vibrancy of color through a monitor outshines the real world, making my digital playground a place of personal experimentation and even joy. But a challenge presents itself when trying to take the artwork out of the computer and into a physical form. I watched the world of printing digital artwork go from the plotted output of Vera Molnár, to the dot-matrix printers of early home computing, to the sophisticated machines of present day. Archival inks can now load modern printers capable of turning digital experimentations into museum-quality prints, as well as outputs onto fabric and other tangible items.
Karen Hochman Brown is a Los Angeles-based photographer using software to manipulate her photographic images.
Hochman Brown received her B.A. in Art from Pitzer College, where she continued to study math. Then leading her to her post-graduate work at California College of the Arts where she received her Master’s introducing Construction Geometry via Art, a now Junior High School curriculum she taught at Pasadena Waldorf School. Today, her work has been widely exhibited in California and throughout the United States.