Knees to Shoulders
Perception is a process of selective attention, the retention of some thing and suspension of something else in the processing of an ongoing excess. What is retained and what is suspended is not self-selected but a non-conscious operation of orientation, habituation, and narration. Perception is permeated by perforation, disruption against expectation, and smoothed over in the process. I see painting as a process and place to process the non-conscious operation of perception with self-conscious attention.
I make a painting by making a stack. Each stack is an alternation between encaustic (colored or uncolored), print (image or abstraction), and drawing or painting (onto the encaustic or print), as few as three layers or as many as thirty. No matter how few or many, the layers are indeterminate and indivisible. Each layer is semi-transparent and all layers altogether congealed. Each painting is enfolded around a photograph or set of photographs. The singularity and reliability of the photograph(s) is agitated by their multiplicity and relativity in the painting(s). What is retained and what is suspended is upended, simultaneously affective amidst an encapsulating shield.
Recent paintings unfold photographs by or of my father, an artist who has early-onset Alzheimer’s. The camera, alternately, acts as a prosthetic device for memory or a maladaptive technology. The photographs, consequently, stutter in discernibility. Progressively punctuated by perforation, by gap as by fog, the paintings picture the ascendant disassociation between the picture attempted and the picture attained. Through sustained collaboration I’ve attended the evolution of his perception.
I make a painting by making a stack. Each stack is an alternation between encaustic (colored or uncolored), print (image or abstraction), and drawing or painting (onto the encaustic or print), as few as three layers or as many as thirty. No matter how few or many, the layers are indeterminate and indivisible. Each layer is semi-transparent and all layers altogether congealed. Each painting is enfolded around a photograph or set of photographs. The singularity and reliability of the photograph(s) is agitated by their multiplicity and relativity in the painting(s). What is retained and what is suspended is upended, simultaneously affective amidst an encapsulating shield.
Recent paintings unfold photographs by or of my father, an artist who has early-onset Alzheimer’s. The camera, alternately, acts as a prosthetic device for memory or a maladaptive technology. The photographs, consequently, stutter in discernibility. Progressively punctuated by perforation, by gap as by fog, the paintings picture the ascendant disassociation between the picture attempted and the picture attained. Through sustained collaboration I’ve attended the evolution of his perception.