Billy Renkl uses old, retired, images and documents from antique didactic texts, allowing for the possibility of meaning and metaphor in their peculiar beauty and often accidental aesthetic. In these images, diagrams, and maps, the world is represented as both sensible and miraculous, systematic and astonishing. These images were originally made to be clear and objective, a rational distillation of a mechanical world; it turns out they are also rich in beauty and poetry. In many of these works Renkl's focus on information graphics is combined with his interest in the ways that abstraction has been used to mediate the natural world.
collections
The Tennessee State Museum
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Previously Featured Projects
Untitled (Deus ex Machina)
2012
unique collage with archival adhesive
16" x 19"