MFA Painting, Room 300U

@briannahowardstudio

briannahowardstudio.com

“Edge of Measure,” 24” x 30”, Acrylic on canvas

These paintings build themselves through repetition. A single dot holds little on its own, but when placed in relation to thousands of others it gathers into something larger, vibration, surface, or field. The mark is at once microscopic and structural, intimate in its making but expansive in its accumulation. The paintings do not resolve all at once. They unfold over time, shifting between the tactile immediacy of texture and the distance of optical effect.

The mesh functions as both tool and matrix, guiding the dots into grids that are never entirely stable. What begins as a system of order slips into misalignment, producing interference and moiré. These distortions, ripples, flickers, doubled forms, echo the language of digital breakdown, where images falter into low fidelity. Yet in these works instability is generative. Form emerges not in clarity but in overlap, in the tension between systems that cannot fully align. Meaning is found in the friction of accumulation rather than in a singular resolved image.

These paintings also engage with how information behaves, how it accumulates, shifts, and sometimes disappears. Each dot functions like a small unit of data. Up close, it reads as texture; from a distance, it becomes a field, a network of relations that resists any single interpretation. The work stages interference, grids slipping against each other and layers slightly out of sync, creating moiré-like vibrations. The paintings explore how knowledge can be lost, misread, or degraded over time, and how systems can contain meaning that is sensed but not fully decoded. They investigate the tension between clarity and noise, structure and error, presence and absence, revealing how information exists as both material and pattern, tangible and elusive.

In this way, the paintings behave less like representations and more like inscriptions, closer to writing or code. They are built mark by mark, but what they construct is not narrative or depiction. They create duration, a ground that holds pressure, memory, and interference. The surfaces insist on oscillation, on the persistence of what resists capture. Rather than offering images to be consumed quickly, these works stage encounters that require time, to dwell, to attune, to experience how repetition unsettles as much as it organizes. They do not answer. They accumulate. They refuse resolution, yet remain charged, alive with the possibility that something emerges in the space between control and slippage, legibility and blur, mark and field.