Brian Piana (Houston, TX) www.spillsomepaint.com

(scroll down for statement)

Brian Piana, Barack's Twitter, 2007, Inkjet Print, 15 x 24 inches, courtesy of the artist

Brian Piana, Shopping for a Designer Wallet (2005 | 2007), 2007, Inkjet Print, 30 x 27 inches, courtesy of the artist

Artist Statement

The Internet provides individuals, groups, and organizations a worldwide multimedia forum for expression, promotion, branding, and sales. My work uses abstractions of actual websites to create new compositions in a removed, off-line environment. The layout, structure, and purpose of these sites directly inform the compositions and narratives of my work. Colors and shapes are governed almost exclusively by the original website's design, and linked pages of a single site are often included, providing a diagram of a site user's online path in my final composition.

Barack's Twitter, for example, is a single-page abstraction of the (then) Presidential candidate's Twitter account. The more visually complex Shopping for a Designer Wallet (2005 | 2007) presents juxtaposed diagrams of the same task on the same website, recording both visual and usability changes that occurred in the span of two years' time.

Using deconstructed websites as their foundation, the animations on display employ additional motion, transitions, and sound of my own design to create new time-based narratives. Regular and Diet oscillates between the contrasting designs of two related commercial websites, while Browsing for Dannielle Tegeder playfully recreates the activity of clicking through a gallery's website to view images of an artist's work.