Press Release
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The Landing Gallery is thrilled to present Scroll Interference, an exhibition of acrylic on wood panel paintings by Nevada City-based artist Candace Thatcher. Thatcher’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, Scroll Interference features brand new works from her Archive Scan series, and will be on view from July 22nd to September 2nd, 2023.

In Scroll Interference, undulating waves of fluorescent color roll across the gallery’s walls. The two-dimensional works have a sculptural intensity, owing in part to the hallucinatory quality of the moiré patterns that structure their compositions. Multicolored grids swell and contract within each painting, producing surfaces that mimic topographical maps, the tumults of the sea, or – most fittingly – the interference patterns produced by scanned digital images or photographed computer screens.

Thatcher works with what Hito Steyerl has termed “poor images,” or images that have lost resolution due to their free circulation online. A once pristinely clear photograph might, once posted and re-posted, end up pixelated on a slowly-loading webpage. Thatcher reifies such moments of digital abstraction, transforming screenshots of low-quality pictures culled from all annals of the internet into bump maps of raw visual data that inspire her paintings.

With auspices in early computer art and the Op-Art of the 1960s, Thatcher’s process registers one tenor of the digital sublime. Vast troves of data comprise each of the thousands of images we interface with daily—data that Thatcher experiments with in order to produce her compositions. After translating her collected screenshots into code environments recording the value of each pixel, Thatcher tweaks the code to produce patterns of overlaid grids. While scripting the code, she pays particular attention to optical effects of color mixing detached from the colors present in the source image itself, therefore bringing the spirit of color theorist Albers to the geometric psychedelia of Vasarely.

As Thatcher builds her paintings based upon the code’s sculpturally distorted grids, the digital returns to an analogue state. Within the paintings, each color forms a distinct layer, with clear medium functioning as a buffer between them. Because the clear medium allows light to penetrate between the layers of fluorescent color, this layering process mimics the effect of the backlit screen. The Archive Scan works not only simulate the glow of the screen, but also its flatness and illusion of depth. When regarding the paintings from the side, the patterns break as their visual information goes flat.

“We are bombarded by overstimulation from imagery overload through the experience of our computer screens and smartphones,” Thatcher writes, responding to how the internet and the digital are now inseparable from our conceptions of self and outside world. But rather than abstracting the screen world from the human body, Thatcher returns the “digital” to its etymological root signifying prehensile touch. In this way, she works in what Marshall McLuhan termed a “cool medium,” one that requires the active participation of a viewer to complete a work. Unlike the absorbing illusionism of cinema or hyperreal digital imagery (McLuhan’s “hot” mediums), the cool medium requires our detached contemplation to fulfill its ends. Scroll Interference testifies to how even the hottest of mediums can cool—how the most powerful of illusions have gaps and discontinuities. We construct the bombarding digital world, but we can also deconstruct it.

Candace Thatcher is a Nevada City-based artist whose practice includes new media, drawing, painting, and digital manipulations, such as appropriating a pre-existing image and painting the resulting data. She is interested in the dematerialization of artwork and archiving images using 3D software by crafting coded imagery and painting the topographical read. Thatcher's first solo exhibition was at The Chambers Project in Grass Valley, CA (2022).