Out-of-Square: The Outer Square Paradox

At the center of Out-of-Square is a simple refusal:
the image does not accept the square as an authority.

The work speaks about floating—about form existing without corners, without containment, without inherited rules about where an image must stop. The subject softens into space. Edges dissolve. The picture behaves as if the square never existed.

And yet, in some pieces, it unmistakably does.

This is where Outer Square appears.

Out-of-Square is the concept—the intent to move beyond the square as a governing structure. Outer Square is a specific condition inside that concept: a deliberate contradiction where the square remains visible, but no longer functions as a container.

Every Outer Square is still a square.
But the image does not live inside it.

Instead, the picture presses outward. It leans against the boundary, breaks the agreement, and visually exits the shape. The square becomes a reference plane rather than a frame—something the image acknowledges, then ignores.

When you look at an Outer Square piece, your eye doesn’t register “framed artwork.” It registers escape. The square becomes residue. A trace of structure. A reminder of how images used to behave.

This tension is intentional.

We are conditioned to trust the square. It has always been the quiet contract between artist and viewer: this is where the image ends. In Outer Square, that contract is quietly broken. The image doesn’t destroy the square. It simply refuses to obey it.

That distinction matters.

The square is not rejected outright—it is stripped of authority.

This is what gives Outer Square its irony. The work claims a no-corner space while allowing the square to remain present. Not as a ruler, but as a foil. The image exists out-of-square while the square itself lingers as an outer reference.

So yes—there are corners.
They’re just no longer in charge.

The work lives in that moment where structure still exists, but meaning has already moved beyond it. Where the image remembers where it came from, even as it insists on becoming something else.

That is the paradox of Outer Square within Out-of-Square:
The square remains—but the picture doesn’t stay.

And once you see it that way, the square never looks the same again.

And then there’s the last, quiet layer of irony.

After all of this—after rejecting corners, after pushing images out of frames, after loosening the authority of the square—the work is presented inside a space literally called Squarespace.

A square space.

It’s not a joke, but it’s not accidental either.

The platform is structured. Gridded. Predictable. It’s built on alignment, margins, and containment. And yet, within that environment, the images refuse to behave. They don’t sit politely. They don’t center themselves for comfort. They push outward, visually and conceptually, against the very system holding them.

This matters.

Because Out-of-Square isn’t about escaping structure altogether. It’s about revealing it—and then moving beyond it. The square still exists. The system still exists. The rules are still visible.

They just aren’t in control.

So the work lives out-of-square, inside Square Space, while asserting a no-corner space of its own. The contradiction isn’t resolved. It’s preserved. Held in tension.

The image doesn’t deny the square.
It simply refuses to stay inside it.

And that’s where the work actually begins.

Out-of-Square is not about showing less detail.
It is about removing so much that the image can no longer complete itself on the surface.

The instrument is largely absent.
The body that once defined it is gone. What remains are functional remnants—surfaces of contact, traces of use—freed from the objects that once contained them. A part is no longer a part. It becomes a shape. A location. A record of motion.

Figures are not rendered in full. They are reduced to fragments. Not anatomical descriptions. Not photographic accuracy. Only the minimum required to suggest action.

This is not a close-up that breaks past the edge of a frame.
This is not an image asserting itself through excess.

It is built through subtraction.

So much is removed that what remains cannot stand alone. The viewer is required to supply what is missing—the instrument, the gesture, the pressure, the sound. The work does not finish itself.

In Out-of-Square, absence is not empty space. It is an active component. Removal becomes the organizing structure. Meaning forms where detail has been deliberately withheld.

If the viewer looks only for what is present, the image will feel incomplete.
If the viewer expects resolution on the surface, it won’t arrive.

The work resolves only through participation—through imagining beyond what is shown rather than staying confined to what is given.

And if nothing appears to resolve at all, that may say less about the image
and more about the shape the mind prefers to remain inside.

The work resolves only through participation—through imagining beyond what is shown rather than staying confined to what is given.

If the image feels unfinished, that is intentional.
If it feels incomplete, that is the invitation.

You may only understand Out-of-Square
if your mind is not square.