WILLIAM BETTS

August 2025

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As an artist, I’ve spent much of my career exploring systems of surveillance, privacy, and control—using a proprietary, technology-based paint application process I developed to translate digital information into precise layers and areas of color. My early work drew from security camera footage and low-resolution video feeds, confronting viewers with the aesthetics of a world increasingly shaped by observation and data. That same process—the machine-guided placement of thousands of individual drops of paint—still underpins my current work, but for this body of work, my subject matter has shifted dramatically. I am now focusing on large-scale paintings of forests and other landscapes.

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This turn to nature may seem like a departure, but for me, it’s a continuation of the same inquiry—only refracted through a different lens. The forest, in many ways, has become one of the last remaining symbols of escape, quiet, and mystery. Yet ironically, most people today experience it not through direct interaction, but through technology—through Instagram posts, drone footage, GPS tags, and filtered photographs. The forest is increasingly consumed as content, flattened into pixels and optimized for engagement. My paintings reflect this contradiction: they depict natural spaces, but they are built through a mechanical, digitally informed process—one that mirrors the way we encounter nature today, through screens and algorithms.

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What adds another layer of complexity to my current work is that the forests I paint are not untouched wilderness—they are often landscapes located in national, state, and provincial parks. These are spaces that have been set aside and protected by institutions, but they are also highly managed environments. We think of them as wild, yet they are carefully maintained, surveilled, mapped, and controlled. Visitors move through them on prescribed paths, often navigating by smartphone, experiencing the forest through layers of mediation. In this way, the park becomes both a refuge and a regulated zone—a paradox not unlike the one embedded in my own process. By using a system rooted in control and digital precision to depict these curated landscapes, I’m calling attention to the irony that even in our pursuit of nature, we remain within the structures of oversight and design.

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There’s an inherent tension in using a method developed to critique surveillance to depict forests that themselves exist within systems of protection and control. I lean into that friction. My work is about the collision between the organic and the synthetic, the immersive and the mediated, the wild and the watched. These paintings are not just landscapes; they are psychological and political spaces shaped by longing, memory, infrastructure, and ideology. They ask what it means to seek refuge in nature when that refuge is itself a managed experience—and whether we can ever truly escape the systems we’ve built around ourselves.

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