Travess Smalley has been developing Pixel Rugs since 2018–19, exploring the pixel as both a digital building block and a unit of pattern. Drawing on video game aesthetics, procedural generation, and the visual traditions of Appalachian quilts, Smalley uses Photoshop as a generative tool, layering, rotating, and transforming small grids to produce images that are at once systematic and unpredictable. Over the years, the project has grown into an evolving body of work, with individual pieces minted as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, forming a digital record of its development.
Pixel Rugs brings together different embodiments of the project: digital works, process animations, prints, woven rugs, and Pixel Rugs, the monograph recently published by Vetro Editions. Each medium offers a different encounter with the image. Colours shift, patterns emerge, and the rigid pixel grid takes on new qualities in light, ink, paper, and wool. The animations reveal the process as a sequence of possibilities rather than a fixed result, making visible the experiments and unexpected turns behind each composition.