The square confesses the pixel
The square as an exposed confession of pixel logic: Four Corners (2002) -- the artist's first digital photo collage -- was made while actively learning the mechanics of digital resolution and printing, discovering that a photograph is secretly a grid of tiny squares built to look continuous. In the one part of the painting with no photographic source at all, the black sky, the artist painted the grid undisguised: a flat square sun, moon, Mars, and star, contrived and 'man-made' rather than naturalistic or naively symbolic. This same pixel-grid instinct may also underlie the square canvas format itself, used across all four founding Art Collision paintings and only much later given explicit theoretical language in Basel Switzerland's 'neither portrait nor landscape' framing (Digital City Series) -- one instinct operating at two scales, the unit and the whole canvas, five years apart in articulation.