David R. Drake
Minimum Chick panels 1 & 3
Paint on panel
23 units, each unit 12" x 24" x 3"
'’ve processed scans of Jack T. Chick’s 1976 tract, The Contract!, using a mosaic filter set to maximum cell size. This converts each page to a minimum number of monochrome blocks, producing a kind of map of the original image. By reducing the tract to a near-minimum of information, the denotative and connotative meanings of the original are lost. Chick’s melodramatic conversion narrative vanishes, along with Carter's line art, and the layers of race/class/ethnicity subtext. What remains is still correlated with the original, as any given tract would produce a unique set of panels. However, this conversion is strictly one-way: unlike John Freeman’s soul, the lost information cannot be regained.