LA-based photographer and painter John Houck creates illusions grounded in color theory, the history of deception in photography, and the way painting connects to these two realms of thought. For his Accumulator #31_01 series, Houck wrote a looping computer program that manufactures different arrangements of color. Analyzing the myriad combinations created by this program, Houck begins to select the ones he wants to work with. With utmost precision and care, Houck arranges layers of smoothly painted paper swatches with and without folds in them. Houck maneuvers the lighting in his studio space to achieve the desired shadows cast by the folds and overlapping sheets of paper. Through iterative steps in this process, his photographs of these arrangements become a playful conundrum on what is real versus what is illusory. Houck has had numerous solo shows in museums all over the world and his work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; LACMA, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; and SFMoMA, San Francisco.
John Houck
ACCUMULATOR #31_01, 2 COLORS EACH #447176, #A66A60, 2 COLORS EACH #7FA19C, #416E90
2019
creased archival pigment prints
20 x 16 inches each