Using painting, drawing and abstraction as markers of a space outside of the verbal and within the visible, my work examines slow exchanges between perception, matter, and psychology that develop in peripheral spaces over time. Searching for meaning in the minor and the overlooked, the work focuses on the links between perception and emotion as they unfold in silent events of cognitive illumination. Each piece is developed through prolonged processes and stages to materialize intense shifts in how what we “see”, internally and outwardly, changes through duration. Moving through the works are forms that act as obstructions, veils, thresholds, or openings, oscillating between various states of hard materiality and atmospheric radiance.
Inspired by frescoes dramatically altered through chance and erosion, I work with oil on a plaster-like surface. Making only four paintings a year, the works are created concurrently and gradually, offering space for the labor and process of paying attention. Stages of repetitive marking and notching, aggressive chiseling, sudden removal, invisible labor, illumination, and aggregated layering become inscribed in the body of the painting. The particular historical gravity and physical density of fresco creates a weight for the minor experiences that are the subject of each piece, bringing the ephemeral into concrete form.
My approach to art making is philosophical and informed by Minimalism's consideration of the perceptual body along with Post-Minimalism’s attention to process and duration. Influenced by feminist thought to dislocate hierarchical terms of the sublime, the sources of abstraction are derived from momentary events in everyday life that interrupt and reposition both feeling and thought. It is important for me to create a space of exchange between the material object of the painting or drawing and the viewer. When the works are viewed from different distances, they move between reticent abstract form, intense optical shifts, and an intimate sense of materiality, creating a specific resonance while resisting closure.
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While slowly developing the paintings over extended periods of time, I work on distinct but overlapping drawing projects that connect to these works. These consist of the notebook drawings, works on paper, remainders, and traces.
The notebook drawings are made directly with colored pencil in drawing books then torn out and joined with linen tape. Reductive in form, these drawings follow shifts in perception through time and the sensations of seeing, feeling and thinking in the periphery of lived spaces and the body. The combination of restrained forms and the central seam bring attention to their fragility and indicate the intimacy of the book as their source. I use these drawings as “notes”, gathering them in different groupings to help order stages within the paintings. Writing on the back, which I call “notations”, are conceived in conjunction with the drawings, and inform the development of the paintings.
The mixed media works on paper expand upon the fields and delineations within the paintings, reflecting a similar process as they are painted, marked, sanded, picked, erased, layered, carved, cut, worked on top of each other, as well as from both sides. These works are created slowly, almost blindly, while incorporating the index of time, marks, and residual atmosphere formed beneath and between the peripheral activities of making and daily studio life.
The remainders are graphite rubbings made of the paintings. Every time the surface of the paintings changes significantly, a graphite impression is made to transcribe the surface. The set of remainders made for each painting stays together as one piece and are shown chronologically, left to right. As sedimentary events, they materialize forms within the paintings that have become invisible, partial, or erased. These works map the transitive passages of the paintings, becoming their indexes, unfolding time in a sequence while asserting the materiality of the paintings. The final remainders are made from the surfaces of completed paintings.
The mixed media works on paper expand upon the fields and delineations within the paintings, reflecting a similar process as they are painted, marked, sanded, picked, erased, layered, carved, cut, worked on top of each other, as well as from both sides. These works are created slowly, almost blindly, while incorporating the index of time, marks, and residual atmosphere formed beneath and between the peripheral activities of making and daily studio life.
The remainders are graphite rubbings made of the paintings. Every time the surface of the paintings changes significantly, a graphite impression is made to transcribe the surface. The set of remainders made for each painting stays together as one piece and are shown chronologically, left to right. As sedimentary events, they materialize forms within the paintings that have become invisible, partial, or erased. These works map the transitive passages of the paintings, becoming their indexes, unfolding time in a sequence while asserting the materiality of the paintings. The final remainders are made from the surfaces of completed paintings.
The traces are made on grey paper from either a rubbing of the surface of the paintings in progress, from beneath and between the works on paper, or a combination of both. These works are a way to capture the stages, ideas and poetics that surface and are then subsumed in the development of works, and to assert momentary flashes of visibility within dense aggregations of time. Form is often reduced and either reflects the directness and color of the notebook drawings, or the chance pressures of time and residual marks in the works on paper.