Not a picture but an event

In his 1952 essay The American Action Painters, Harold Rosenberg characterizes the painting method of the New York School artists not aesthetically, but instead by their process of creation: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act … What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."

As a dancer and new media artist, this analysis speaks to my own practice nearly seventy years later. Not a picture but an event demonstrates my digital interpretation of "gesture to canvas." Instead of moving around a physical canvas to apply paint, I am moving in front of a webcam to render pixels that represent my form on screen.

The final three images were printed in an edition of one hundred each at Lucky Risograph on the Lower East Side in New York City and mailed to donors of the Processing Foundation’s 2019 Fundraising Campaign.