I make paintings of minute interlocking marks. I am inspired by the techniques of traditional weaving and Islamic tiling, as well as the related pixel-based production of digital images. By imitating machings through my accumulative and methodical process, I can ultimately find the limits of human capacity. In one sense that human capacity is of physical labor. My process exists in that space between pleasurable meditative practice and endurance. When compared to a machine's process, mine is slow and inefficient. All the marks are handmade, and thus slightly variable. They are still, however, repetitive modular units, variable only as a residue of process, not as a result of intent. I am interested in artists such as Georges Seurat and Yayoi Kusama, whose work redefines the artist's hand as an instrument for mechanical sameness, rather than an expression of individuality.

Thinking about the possibility of manipulating an image on a computer, I have started to make twin and triplet paintings. With the touch of a button, an image can now exist in many forms: greener, bluer, darker, less contrast, smaller, etc. The impetus for making the multiple paintings is the desire to present tow or more such options to the viewer simultaneously. I like how the multiples question Painting's boundedness within a single rectangular frame. The work is not a superficial critique of easel painting, but rather a presentation of a profound doubt of its historical limitations. These works are not mere diptychs and triptychs: their meaning ultimately resides in their sameness as well as in their complementary nature. They multiple paintings exist only in relation to one another.

Technological advances compel us to redefine what it means to be human. As David Moos writes in The Architecture of the Mind, those who study Artificial Intelligence are increasingly preoccupied with the human organism as a model for the machine: "the architecture of the [machine] system should mimic with an infinite degree of accuracy the architecture of the mind."

Conversely, as a painter, I am increasingly interested in mimicking machine intelligence in order to differentiate myself from it. What provides the charge in the work is that space of difference myself from it. What provides the charge in the work is that space of difference: the breakdown of regularity through the sensuousness of the material paint and slight variability of the hand. From a great distance, the paintings might resemble blurred airbrushed surfaces or even spontaneous splashes of paint. Only at a closer distance can one fully appreciate their materiality and understand the method of their modular production. I like seducing the viewer (and myself) with rich surface and color as I present the contrivance of my production.

--Anoka Faruqee, 2010