31 Days

Oakland-based painter Chris Ashley makes beautiful digital drawings that both reaffirm and challenge notions of "internet art". His works are crafted in HTML and live primarily on the internet, the native environment of the HyperText Markup Language. In this context, the images constructed are not translated into single image files like JPGs or GIFs; they live as visualizations of the code that defines them. But these visualizations have also recently been celebrated offline, as prints, and it is in this scenario that Ashley is able to show what one might call post-internet net art. For his new online exhibition, I Made This For You, the artist has made a different image for every day in the month of December. It seems fitting that Ashley's images, which recall the visual language of modernity, architecture, optical illusions, and web-based tables, would present his work in the grid-like, nominally time-based structure of a calendar. His intention is that the prints of these images will be hung in such a fashion, adding an air of site-specificity to works that emerged from a largely ephemeral space. For now, the richly colorful drawings are on the web at Marjorie Wood Gallery, the online art space founded by Bay Area photographer and installation artist Chris Komater which regularly commissions new internet-based visual and literary art works. After perusing the month of December, as Ashley envisions it, net art fans might travel back in time through the gallery's excellent archive. - Marisa Olson