Whether visiting museums and galleries in person, surfing the web, watching a movie, flipping through a book, or even scrolling Instagram, it’s easy to become captivated with innumerable forms of art and visual culture. Generally, though, our instinct is to immerse ourselves within the visual content of the work – everything we see atop the physical surface of the work. 

But what happens when we strip away that foremost layer, and expose the framework of how art is made, viewed and experienced? Brushstrokes become topographical maps. Photographs become a latticed framework of silver particles or grid of electrical current flowing through a computer chip. Prints are reduced to microscopic droplets of ink, swirling together to represent a single piece of visual information. Pixels change shape, structure and color as Photoshop algorithms interpret and restructure images to fit the demands of different viewing platforms. 

Invisible Structures invites the viewer into Jon Malis’ research studio, presenting an ongoing catalogue of the various ways tools, techniques and situations influence how we produce, view and experience art.