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We snap spontaneous pictures on our handy cell phones all the time: at concerts, parties, family gatherings. The results are generally ephemera, grainy records or personal artifacts, meaningful only to the photographer and subject.

Brett Sykes, a newly minted Utah Valley State College graduate, has joined a growing worldwide movement exploring cell-phone imagery as a new genre of art.

Sykes began making art from cell-phone snapshots during his final year in college. A year later, "Pixelism," a collection of nine of his oversized photographs, is on display at the art gallery at Thanksgiving Point. It's a small but cutting-edge examination of the painterly qualities to be found in the stripped-down levels of a ubiquitous technology.

Precise imprecision: Trained in representational photography, Sykes was drawn to cell-phone camera imagery by its tendency toward abstraction.

He was tired of the trumpeted advancements in modern digital photography. He saw companies introducing bigger, better and more precise digital cameras to the market, but rather than wanting to use them, Sykes, a Toronto native who came to Utah to study art, was more interested in studying fundamental structures.

His aim, then, was retrograde and avant garde. He chose to shoot on a Motorola RAZR phone, the most popular cell-phone camera, with the intention of exploring the images an average user takes for granted. "My grandmother uses this camera, my mother," Sykes said. "Your mother."

The fact that the cell phone's camera was rudimentary - "difficult to play with," he said, "thanks to a bad sensor and no F-stop" - was the point.

Photography is usually about control, from the taking of the image to its final presentation. Sykes says there was something freeing and terrifying about surrendering to the "vicissitudes and variables" of imprecision.

Subject matter and process: Sykes began shooting pictures of friends and then taking images of roadside accidents, the latter for their voyeuristic quality. He later moved on to other subjects, particularly intrigued by the removed quality of movie stills.

Regardless of content, when he loaded and manipulated the shots into Adobe Photoshop, the results were mesmerizing.

The enlarged images are "so energetic that, when you stand in front of them, they almost vibrate," said Jackie Brethen, an L.A.-based photographer and Sykes' former mentor at UVSC.

To produce this effect, Sykes takes images at the regular 70 pixels per inch and reduces their resolution to 15. Then he blows up the entire image and prints it on photographic paper 6 feet wide and 3 feet high.

The result is something we don't normally see in photography. "What you get is a painterly effect, with aggregations of color on different planes" where the pixels start to break down," Brethen says.

Influences and cohorts: Sykes, 25, is thoughtful about the theoretical underpinnings of his work. Brethen says she has never met another student or "even an another artist who thinks as seriously and on as many levels" as Sykes.

Sykes cites Robert Rauschenberg and Chuck Close as key influences, since both artists incorporate and grapple with the layers in technology. But he is most influenced by John Baldessari, an American conceptual artist who considered the everyday through the collaging of words and photos.

Baldessari's work suggests that viewers recognize the presented world more than we recognize the world itself - that is, we see images of things rather than the things themselves. "I wanted to break that notion down ever further," Sykes said.

But what the young artist didn't realize is that his cell-phone work was part of a bigger contemporary artistic movement. Last year, Irene Hoffman, director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, organized what was thought to be the only known curated exhibition about cell-phone imagery, culling art from New York, Los Angeles, Europe and Asia. "If we did the same show now, it would be totally different, because the field is changing as we speak," Hoffman said.

She predicts the artistic trend will spread quickly, thanks to the availability of cell-phone cameras. Hoffman compared its impact to that of the video camera, which was embraced by visual artists, who used it to develop new movements in the art world.

"Cell-phone artists aren't making work yet for a museum audience," Hoffman said, but for a much larger and connected global audience. She predicts it won't be long before the work of Sykes and other artists will enter the canon and, perhaps, the hallowed halls of art institutions worldwide.

Digital-age artwork

* "PIXELISM" is on display until June 3 at the gallery at Thanksgiving Point, 3003 Thanksgiving Way, Lehi. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday and 10 a.m to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call 801-768-2300 or visit www.the-art institute.org.