Quilt: A New Resolution

by David Hooker

Jeremy Botts is a quilt maker…sort of.

The show “Quilt,” installed in the Hansen Gallery at Wheaton College, is both deceptively rich and deceptively simple. It is the most recent body of work by Jeremy Botts, an artist skilled in many media but whose business card simply reads “Designer.” The show is, on one level, an exploration of a graphic design problem. But it is also an exploration of the relationship between art and craft, between the digital and the handmade, an exploration of the role of technology in our understanding and perceptions of ourselves, and a genealogy of the Botts clan.

Bott’s work in this exhibit is a series of portraits of seven consecutive generations of men from his family rendered as photographic “quilts.” These portraits are made from 210 standard sized photographs taped together to create large-scale (5’ x 7’) compositions. The photographs are not created by a camera, but rather are each a small piece of a vector graphic created by Botts in which he skillfully organizes colors from an original photographic portrait using quilt patterns as the basis for organization. In the end, the images are bit-mappy, but bit-mappy in a most unusual way. And that’s the point. The visual information is organized using the organizational systems found in handmade quilts, not computers. Like a pixilated image, as you step back the portrait becomes more clear, but as you draw into the work the quilt pattern—as well as the grid created by the photographs—begins to dominate.

The original images come from family photographs found and gathered by Jeremy from relative’s houses. They range in time period from the mid nineteenth century to the present, the most recent being a photo of the newest addition to the Botts clan, Jeremy’s son Simon. While searching for old photographs, Jeremy also ran across some blocks of a crazy quilt created by his great grandmother Amanda Fickes Bonner. As Jeremy stated in his gallery talk, “When I found these quilted blocks years ago, I knew that I wanted to somehow incorporate them into a future piece. The occasion of my first son’s birth this past December necessitated some commemoration, and a foray into the world of quilts seemed apropos.”

Jeremy designed each quilt from a different historical quilt pattern, each chosen because of specific familial associations (ie. Jeremy chose the pattern “Corn and Beans” for his farmer grandfather, while claiming the “crazy quilt” pattern for himself). Jeremy further explains, “Unlike most photographic images that are defined by pixels within a fixed grid, I have made these ‘quilts’ from vector shapes, which are geometrically defined. Because vectors are determined by points and mathematical directions given between points, they are infinitely scalable with no increase in file size or information.” After making the transition from pixels to vector graphics, Botts then had to assign colors to each individual vector shape, a “rather time consuming, meditative action,” he admits.

Organizing the compositions using quilt patterns was both a design challenge and a unique way of bridging the divide between the digital work Jeremy does and the handcraft work done by his great grandmother. Although radical in terms of a shift from a craft medium to a digital one, it is interesting that the quilt form, in both cases, requires an approach that is slow, deliberate and repetitive (before you begin to think Jeremy’s engagement is different because he was “clicking a mouse,” consider that he also had to tape together a grid of 210 photos for each portrait). In engaging in that process, the show goes beyond the obvious visual connection between Jeremy and the other generations of men in the family, and points to what may be the most significant connection of all; that between Jeremy and his great grandmother (and through her any other family members who made quilts).

With the CIVA biennial conference Matter and Spirit: Art and Belief in a Digital Age coming up this June, and a host of interesting questions on the subject to be found on the CIVA website, I find in Quilt work that engages many of those questions. At the same time I think it poses new, interesting an exciting ways to think about possibilities and directions for digital art. I am wondering about the possibilities of a vibrant dialogue between digital art and craft; two disciplines that are often perceived to be on the opposite end of the spectrum. I am interested in the possibility of using digital art to understand our past, as opposed to trying to create the future. I am curious about the possibility of creating and embracing a digital process that makes us less efficient, and perhaps more present, in our daily lives. I wonder about the possibilities of creating art that points not only to how current technology impacts our lives, but also points out how the new technology grows out of older technology (in this specific case digital art growing out of photography), and how all technology has impacted our understanding of what in means to be human. I pose these ideas not in an attempt to come to any definitive direction, answers, or manifesto concerning the relationship between digital art, material reality, and faith; but rather as a way to expand the dialogue and make it more inclusive.

David Hooker joined the Art Department at Wheaton College in 2005 where he teaches sculpture and ceramics. He holds an M.F.A. in Ceramics from Kent State University and a B.A. in English from Furman University. David is an artist, teacher, curator, exhibition designer whose witty ceramic sculptures engage poignant questions about the self and American life and culture.