When a Screen Becomes a Space for Art

I have spent much of this year trying to spend less time looking at screens. I have become increasingly protective of the quiet parts of my day, returning to books, making things by hand, and other analog experiences that ask for my attention without constantly trying to redirect it. At the same time, some of the most interesting opportunities for my artwork have been happening on screens.

At first, those two things might seem contradictory.

My relationship with Instagram had become particularly difficult. I originally joined social media because it gave me a way to share my work, connect with other artists, and encounter things I might never have found otherwise. Somewhere along the way, sharing became maintaining. There was always another post to make, another format to learn, another message to answer, another reason to pick up the phone. I found myself spending more time feeding the place where people could see my artwork than actually making the artwork I wanted them to see.

I didn’t like feeding the beast, so I began pulling away.

Becoming a signed artist with Loupe has been an important part of that shift. Loupe presents artwork through screens, but it asks the screen to do something very different. Rather than acting as a doorway into an endless stream of unrelated information, it becomes the place where people experience the artwork. A screen that might otherwise drain the viewer now shares my artwork alongside music created by musical artists. It gives someone the opportunity to sit with an image long enough to actually spend time with it. These are the digital experiences I want for myself and want to share with others: no advertising, no endless scrolling, and no dopamine-driven drivel competing for our attention. That distinction matters to me.

I have spent much of my career thinking about how context changes perception. A photograph on a phone is not experienced in the same way as that photograph printed and framed on a wall. A sculpture photographed in my studio is different from the same sculpture encountered in someone's home. The object or image may remain the same, but the surrounding environment changes the experience. A screen is also an environment.

I started thinking about this differently when I released a small group of photographic studies as digital wallpapers. I created these works specifically to live on a screen people already carry with them every day. I wasn't interested in making another piece of content for someone to scroll past. I liked the idea that a familiar device could occasionally become a place for an image to simply remain.

My recent features with CanvasRebel and Oregon Voyager have added another layer to that experience. Both publications exist digitally, but encountering an artist through an interview asks something very different of a screen. Readers have time to read about the experiences behind the work, the decisions that shaped a practice, and the life that continues beyond the images shown. A digital magazine still requires a screen, but opening an article and choosing to read it is very different from encountering an image for a few seconds between unrelated posts. The reader has chosen to enter that space and stay there for a while. The technology hasn't changed, but the way we are using it has.

That realization has helped me understand why moving away from Instagram has not made me want to move away from digital experiences altogether. I’m not rejecting screens. I am consciously becoming more particular about what I want from them. Sometimes I want the physical experience of turning the pages of a book. I want to encounter artworks in person, where I can move around them and watch their surfaces respond to changes in light. I want photographs printed so I can understand their scale and texture. None of those experiences can be completely replaced by a screen, nor do I think they should be.

However, a screen can do things a printed page cannot. It can bring artwork into places it might never physically travel. It can allow a photograph to exist in someone's pocket, appear on a television across the country, or introduce an artist's work to someone who may never walk into the gallery where it would otherwise be shown. The question for me is becoming less about whether an experience is digital or analog and more about the kind of attention the experience allows.

I still retreat from my screens regularly. I suspect I always will. I prefer my phone on a charging stand, and my hands occupied with materials instead. I like physical books and blowing bubbles off my porch with my kids. I like standing in front of artwork long enough to notice something I didn't see when I first approached it.

I also like the possibility that when I eventually turn a screen back on, it doesn't always have to ask me to go somewhere else.

Sometimes the screen itself can become the place I came to see.