OS

"OS" is the catalogue for Wade Guyton's first mid-career survey, organized by Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf. It was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from October 4, 2012 through January 13, 2013.

The exhibition traced a decade of Guyton's work exploring how ordinary digital tools reshape images. He feeds canvas or paper through a desktop inkjet printer and lets its misfires and glitches become the finished paintings and drawings. It brought together more than eighty works dating from 1999. They were arranged in a non-chronological run of staggered walls, and the show closed with two new canvases up to fifty feet long, made specifically for the Whitney's Marcel Breuer building. The title borrows the common acronym for a computer's operating system. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press in 2012, hardcover, 228 pages.

Guyton (b. 1972) works in New York, treating ordinary office and consumer technology — the desktop computer, the scanner, the inkjet printer — as his primary studio tools. "OS" was his first museum survey, gathering more than a decade of that work under one roof.