Visual displays of information help us make sense of a complex world. While generally designed to be useful or practical rather than aesthetic, data visualizations sometimes yield surprisingly appealing formal qualities when sufficiently abstracted from their original intent. I create geometric abstractions derived from charts, diagrams, and data visualizations related to finance, media, telecommunications, transportation, government, and other sectors.

My artworks are developed digitally, using image viewers like Preview and spreadsheet viewers like Excel to capture or create data visualizations. I then extract fragments or “data cuts” and strip away all signifiers of the original function or purpose of the data. I typically sample color schema from historical artwork or commercial illustrations and apply those colors to the data cuts. These manipulations are executed in vector graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator and outputted as digital files. The completed work is fused to aluminum panel in a 400-degree heat-transfer, dye sublimation process.

The final works harbor a dual quality: on the one hand, the abstractions harbor strong formal and aesthetic qualities, and on the other hand, they impart a lingering sense, conveyed by the highly structured nature of the resulting images, of some kind of significance, a dissonance, or encoded meaning that lies just beyond reach.

— Josh Harlan

Explanatory Drawing

When Will AI Exceed Human Performance references a source image published by The Economist that cites a 2018 study of the same name, collaboratively published by Yale and Oxford. 

Here I have isolated abstract elements of the graph and recolored them in an interim color schema. After identifying several subsets or data “cuts” that resonated with me formally and aesthetically, I sought to create a dialogue between this work and my predecessors from the canon of geometric abstraction. I digitally sampled a color palette used by artist Brice Marden in his minimalist, three-panel composition, Red Yellow Blue I (1974). The digital renderings are then finalized and produced as dye-sublimation prints.