About Jael Whitney Brothers

Jael Whitney Brothers is an Indigenous creative (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) actively engaged with the arts community in the Greater Boston area. With her glitch art as @w3rmwood, she creates art by painting with pixels using digital errors and data disruption. She loves to create futuristic visions using dynamic colors and shapes. Her art has been displayed internationally, including Boston City Hall, Boston Center for the Arts, Harvard University, MIT, Trustman Gallery, New Alliance Gallery, Center for the Arts at the Armory, and more. She also enjoys exploring the weird side of local history in her playwriting, such as the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 or the history of a 100+ year "War on Rats" in Boston, with her works being performed at venues including the Huntington Theater and the Mosesian Center for the Arts. You can follow her work at https://www.instagram.com/w3rmwood/.

My Approach

I have been making Glitch Art for over 15 years. From a young age, I was drawn to using digital tools as one of my various artistic outlets. I particularly enjoyed taking photographs and using photo editing software to create unexpected visual effects by playing with colors, exposure, and otherwise “breaking” the image to create something new, often artifacts and landscapes of imaginary worlds. Eventually, I learned that through my techniques of experimentation I had unintentionally stumbled upon a medium called “Glitch Art” which has been around since the 1960s. Once I knew what it was called, I dived in even further, teaching myself techniques like databending and pixel sorting.

When I moved to Somerville, I was able to attend an exhibit led by one of my favorite glitch artists, who invited me to participate in a few of her gallery shows including Glitchmas at the New Alliance Gallery and Glitchkraft at the Trustman Gallery. This opened up a new world of community art for me, and since then I’ve been particularly passionate about legitimizing glitch art into more “traditional” or mainstream arts spaces by having my works featured in exhibits such as the Boston Center for the Art’s Drawing Show or the Fay Chandler Emerging Art Exhibit at Boston City Hall.

In recent years, my glitch art has combined my love of taking abstract photographs of urban detritus like trash in the street and transforming it into something unexpected, then showcasing the before & after through my online alter-ego “w3rmwood.” I have also used my glitch art in my other creative mediums, including cartooning, textile design, digital collage, and multimedia videos such as a background piece in Raue’s “Ruby Glow” music video produced by Volcom.

As a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, I am also a self-proclaimed “Indigefuturist” and have enjoyed using the intersection of art and technology to learn more about and express my own cultural heritage.

A fellow artist once described my work as “glitch poetry of the mundane,” which I think summarizes my work beautifully, especially since I am also a writer of both poetry and regional historical plays. By recontextualizing the everyday into the fantastical, through my art I invite participants into new ways of seeing and re-imagining the world around them.