In the Studio with Christy Matson: On the occasion of the publication of her book, "Index Color", Los Angeles-based artist Christy Matson discusses her new work.

PM: Do you want to talk about your composition?

CM: The piece, “Sandbar,” is sand dunes, sandbars, beach, water, sky. That is what is in there. There is a thin band of yellow where the sandbar motif meets the respective sky and water motifs. I am not thinking about a specific beach or a specific site, but rather the meeting of earth and water. I am using water and sky interchangeably and intentionally, because they are really one and the same, both in terms of what they actually are, and also in terms of color palette. (The viewer does not need to know all this. It is how I am approaching “Sandbar” compositionally.) There is a dominant pattern in the background. If you see it in person, you will see that it’s made of several different blues. It is not one blue, and these blues interrupt the pattern. The pattern is not solid. It becomes a little bit more gestural in the way that it pops forward or fades to the back as well. For me, it is about inserting the notion of pattern into a physical landscape.

PM: I love the feeling of line, at different angles, and within the composition.

CM: In person the pieces have a textural quality to them. When you get up close to them, you see there is subtle variation within each kind of mark, if we could call it a mark, in the weave structure. “Lantana” has floral motifs, and maybe within a single floral motif, there’s a full range of different structures, which are really just a relationship between the warp material, the threads on my loom and the weft material, which is what I am painting on and weaving with by hand. That is what helps communicate this whole kind of sense of shading, if you will, that really takes the pieces from being very flat to having a lot of dimension to them. And they read very differently, also, from an angle. If you approach “Sandbar,” for example, from a diagonal, from an angle, you will see much more in that piece than you do when you see it straight on.

PM: The idea of analog and digital are very powerful concepts in terms of how communicative experience works. These things have been a subtext of this conversation: the digital with regard to index, the analog, as well as memory, which one could argue is the ultimate analog.

CM: My entire adult life there has been a conversation around the analog and the digital. Now it feels like we have a third thing, artificial intelligence. You google something and the very first thing that comes up at the top is an AI response with often the wrong answer. Why does the default thing here not get it right? The index feels really destabilizing. There is really no way of knowing what even is the index anymore because we are not really existing in this binary of analog space and digital space. We have this kind of like third unknown space that is supposed to be the smartest of them all, and somehow seems to get it the most wrong.