Pixie Party

2021

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Pixie Party began with a question about resolution: how few pixels does it take to make something recognizable?

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The question emerged while making accessories for a series of digital portraits. Flowers, ribbons, trophies, crowns, and other small artifacts had to be reduced to only a handful of pixels. Their limitations became interesting. As the images became smaller and simpler, individual pixels began doing more work, sometimes reaching a point where removing a single square could collapse the image entirely.

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That became the basis for Pixie Party. The library grew to include low-resolution characters, animals, artifacts, flowers, food, vehicles, and increasingly strange things. The first collection included 555 images. Pixie Playgrounds brought them together into larger compositions, while a later group of 111 portraits responded to the rise of generative profile-picture collections. Despite the influence, every image was made individually by hand.

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The limits were useful. A few blocks could describe an ice cream cone or a pig, but they could also carry humor, nostalgia, angst, and a kind of punk teenage irreverence. Pixie Party developed somewhere between a picture book, video game, cartoon, and young-adult novel: bright and naïve at first glance, but increasingly strange and unruly underneath.

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Later works, including the Hue Cubes, reduced the images further while returning to a more uncomplicated sense of play. Throughout the project, the pixel remains both the material and the constraint. The point is not simply to make things small. It is to find the moment when a collection of colored squares becomes something else