He broadened his sources, from television only to photographs, works from the history of art and film and from the news, inserting the banal and generic as counterweights to the iconic and personally significant. He deliberately mixed the recognizable and the obscure, wanting to give viewers some traction, but not too much. The panoply should pose a bit of a challenge, Biel hopes, agreeing with the late writer David Foster Wallace that "it's the job of literature, of art, to get the viewer to want to do the work."
As an accretion of optical and cultural touch points, "Veil" resonates with both Wallace Berman's Verifax collages and Christian Marclay's recent 24-hour-long tour-de-force, "The Clock." Autobiography, social critique and nostalgia converge in all of them. Ironically, Biel no longer owns a television, but he modeled the quaint clunkers in his drawing on the black-and-white set he had in his room as a kid. The physical obsolescence of the monitors makes a nice contradiction to the enduring quality of the images, just as the immediacy of those screen shots contrasts with the slow, manual process of Biel's rendering.
