Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by James Siena, on view 30 October through 20 December 2025 at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication featuring an essay by Geoffrey Young.

Before the “dot com” boom of the mid-90s made code a cultural cornerstone, Siena was already exploring the aesthetics of computational logic. By giving form to the concepts of artificial intelligence and data transmission, he was an early voice in the nascent intersection between art and code.

To articulate these concepts, Siena developed a distinctive approach, employing self-imposed rulesets to govern his mark making; these systems, often referred to as “visual algorithms,” function as constraints to guide his hand through intricate, labyrinthine pattern-making. Sinewy lines conjoin only to split off in fractal directions, while his marks oscillate between figure and ground until the eye settles at a contested homeostasis. Yet, Siena’s technique avoids any sense of mechanistic rigidity. As he embraces the inevitability of human deviation, each disruption in his hand-drawn code is generative, and small mutations cascade across the surface in a feedback loop of chaotic logic.

Siena’s paintings seamlessly illustrate otherwise opaque technological concepts—systems and functions the result of millennia of human ingenuity, whose complexities are glazed over and reduced to a steady hum of background noise in our everyday lives. As we enter into an age of artificial intelligence, an uncharted terrain whose ramifications are beyond our immediate grasp, Siena’s works may be more relevant now than ever. As Geoffrey Young notes, “just as new paintings can influence the past, Siena’s new works most assuredly alter the future.”