Michael Schultheis
EVENT: Outliers at Patricia Cameron Fine Art, through Jan 31.

What is an outlier, anyway? "An outlier is something that statisticians disregard to make more sense of their data, but in fact, sometimes the outliers tell more about the system than the other information. We could say that the traffic on a street corner moves at a speed of around 25 miles per hour, but what an observation of 98 miles per hour tells us is that there was a cop or an ambulance that drove by. It tells us more."

The irregularity tells you something that the expected data doesn't. "Exactly. So I've been doing these squiggles, these abstract linear forms, and repeating them and trying to hone the abstraction to the feeling that I really wanted. And one day I looked at my notebook and realized that what was more interesting than just one of them was their evolution--so I would go in and enhance and highlight the variations. The variance is more interesting."

They remind me of memory games, when you're turning the cards over and looking for the pair, but they all look sort of alike. "Right, and along with that, I work with washes. So I plunk down a series of these, what I call panel abstractions. In data sets you can have all these different data readings, but instead of analyzing them individually, you could take different readings every day, or every seven days, and capture information that shows up on weekends. We'd look at it cross-sectionally. So I create a wash or film over the sets of abstractions, and then before the paint dries I try to rub away to the images I want, if I can remember where they are, and sometimes I don't get to them in time. And then I'll put down another matrix and wash again, and rub the wash away down to the images I want. So in some ways it's about how we deal with memory, and how information--these squiggles--is captured and retained and analyzed."