b'needed software and hardware, customized these as needed, and interacted on her behalf with fabricators of screens and neon tubing. Following the successful exhibition of Tango, Janet quickly developed other ways to take advan-tage of electronic image technology as a painter, starting with framing. A striking collage is evi-dence of her special interest now in pictorial frames: it shows a color reproduction of a detail from her watercolor Study #9, surrounded by close-up photographs of morning glory blossoms taken at the Sheep Meadow. By the end of 2014, she had the idea to surround Study #9 itself with a frame made from cell phones attached end to end, each playing back one of her park videos. Her friend, Arthur Wheelock, the Vermeer specialist, had complained that this particularly gestural watercolor with extensive blank areas lost some of its considerable visual impact when exhibited without a frame against the white walls at the MCNY. Janets enthusiasm for cell-phone cameras has overtones of the Pop sensibility associated with Nam June Paiks acclaimed television assemblages that she had admired in an exhibition at the Asia Society. But it is the way a cell-phone touch screen allows any digital image to be effortlessly enlarged or minimized by zooming in and out on any detail, putting visual space at our ngertips, that fascinates Janet as an artist obsessed with the full range of graphic touch no less than with the challenge to transpose three-dimensional experience onto two-dimensional surfaces by any means. To realize her idea, the Siwoffs managed to locate a manufacturer of screens roughly the size of cell phones that could be interconnected by a video controller with the capacity to distribute any video image sequence across any number of adjacent screens. For example, a single video showing an accordionist wearing an over the head unicorn mask and performing in high heels could be played across several adjacent screens on the right side of this rst video frame, and so enlarged in scale relative to her giant watercolor. Even though it was developed as a complement for a pre-existing work, Janet devised the frame to interrelate with Study #9 both visually and conceptually. In an email sent to Siwoff in March 2015, Janet stressed how the combination of painting and video border would capture the experience of being in New Yorks Central Park. The overall should be diversity and in [a] sense a garden of Eden joy of life, where the melting pot and family ties and human activity are portrayed. Janet concluded: I know this is a big ambition. The video-image sequences for her rst frame were created with reference to the edges of the landscape composition of the central watercolor: videos with gures lying on the grass for the bottom side of the frame; overhead leaves for the top; upright gures at the sidesdancing newlyweds and the accordionist. The roughly three-minutelong sequences introduce several motifs that will reappear in subsequent videos: horse-drawn hansom carriages; a white girl and a Black boy running playfully across the lawn together; a solitary walker whom Janet refers to as Death, oblivious to the heat in a hooded jacket, and burdened with a large bag; a Black male photographer with a light-skinned female model in a bikini; guitarists and ddlers. Among these favorite motifs is a video animation of green brushstrokes as stand-ins for rippling blades of grass, observed close-up, these superimposed on a color photograph of a reclined woman with a giant back tattoo who mostly obscures her lover. Both this video animation and the underlying photograph re-appear as collage elements in subsequent works, and Janet eventually painted a life-size version of the merged gures in the photograph as the centerpiece of Blue Jeans/Condoms. To judge from Janets photos and videos, tattoos are popular with the Sheep Meadow crowd, and it is hard to overlook how tattoos are pictures within pictures, no different in essence from the video components variously incorporated into her multimedia works. Made quickly to seize some special visual opportunity, more or less at the same time and in the (continued on page 59) OPPOSITEDetail of Bees Dick in 2021 showing a video of a bird on a LCD screen embedded in the canvas. OVERLEAFDetail of the same section of Bees Dick after the addition of photographic collage elements. PAGES 5455Bees Dick as photographed in 2022. 54 55'