Curator, Ann Temkin: Jennifer Bartlett spoke about these paintings in 2006.
Artist, Jennifer Bartlett: I do all those drawings on graph paper that everyone did at that time in the early 70s. And people would hang them up with their push pins and all of them would really look very elegant…Well mine didn't look like that, they just (Laughs) like somebody had walked all over it. So I thought, "Well what if I had hard graph paper?" …I could just swab them down with thinner and I would have a fresh plate for the next day, a fresh couple of plates.
Ann Temkin: In the paired plates in Equivalents, Bartlett painted the sequence of dots in a random arrangement on one plate, and in an orderly row on its mate.
Using Testor's brand enamel hobby paints, usually used for things like model airplanes, Bartlett applied dots of color to the grid. She limited her palette to six colors: White, yellow, red, blue, green and black. She said that these were the colors she would expect to see in a child's box of crayons and she always applied them in that order.
She doubled the number of dots with each pair of plates, starting at the top with six dots per plate, and ending at the bottom with 1,536. As you can see, the different results of the two approaches are dramatic. In the end, the left hand column shows us chaos, random arrangement. The right hand column shows us order, nice boxes of the six colors.
To the right in the work entitled Binary Combinations, Bartlett makes what is basically a color chart of all the two-color combinations possible. On some plates she applies the colors in alternating dots, for example, red-yellow, red-yellow, red-yellow, while on others she combines equal amounts of the two paints to create a new color. Rather than red and yellow: in other words orange. So what we see here are the strikingly different visual effects of these two ways of combining color.