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Color modified by the act of naming.
Contemporary color, in its abstraction and divorce from the specificity of place and material, finds itself subject to the motives of paint corporations, decorators, and marketing firms. PANTONE, for example, uses two color naming systems in parallel, a precise numerical system used in practice by designers, and a clever set of color names useful in seducing consumers.
Rose Quartz or Living Coral, PANTONE’s Color of the Year selections from 2016 and 2019, are far more seductive to consumers than their respective PANTONE codes: Pantone 13-1520 or Pantone 16-1546. This vast sea of language and naming operates like an arcane, glitched-out system of representation, drawing as much from science as from clever marketing departments, and bordering on the absurd.
This series of images and animations are constructed entirely from pure colors and the names assigned to those colors by various corporations, stealthily projecting gender, identity, and association onto color.