Joelle Dietrick

Region: South

Website: https://joelledietrick.com/

City / State: Davidson, NC

My paintings, prints, and animations explore contemporary nesting instincts and their manipulation by global economic systems. Mirroring network automation, I use custom code to push forward the practice of painting. Many of the paintings are large and temporary, made with house paint directly on the wall. The palettes are taken from color forecasts created just before the housing bubble burst.

Related animations and public artworks imitate packet switching, a contemporary communications technique that breaks digital files into smaller manageable blocks of data called packets. Each packet is then sent through a network, taking the quickest route possible; once the packets reach their destination, the file is reassembled. One JPG image, for example, might be broken into several packets, each of which may travel a different path through the Net, even through different cities, before being recompiled into an exact copy of the original file.