In the studio, I ask myself: where do the social and the private collide? How can I implicate my unconscious interior scripts into larger social fantasies? In recent drawings considering the exterior and interior, I juxtapose images evoking the history of US westward expansion, nation-building and religious traditions with typed narratives lifted from my dream journal. Using projectors, digital and physical distortion, and transfer techniques, my hand mediates appropriated imagery with additional layers of removal.
I also make paintings by winding 2” strips of dyed canvas around a wooden core until an image-bearing is amassed by the accumulation of edge, like a cross-section of a densely packed volume, like a bale of hay. The wooden core around which the material gathers, like a plugged hole, expresses a fixity at the center of an otherwise permeable painterly field. The material I cut down to make one of these paintings is about the size of a medium-large Abstract Expressionist or Color Field canvas; my works often emanate atmospheric color and staining-like effects informed by the lineage of artists from these movements. I’m compelled by the compression of a painterly field - an extreme decrease in the scale of a material by giving it a new form that nevertheless contains the full original surface area. This set of operations produces depth literally rather than representationally. The expansive fields created by Pollock, Reinhardt, Frankenthaler, Louis, Nolan contain vestiges of a faith in a kind of interior expression before the foreclosure of this possibility by the advent of post-Fordism and financialized capital. At the same time, these painters signify for many an image of national identity/exceptionalism. By invoking these painters through abstracting and compressing their forms, I’m curious what might be recovered or restored from the past. Simultaneously, how do images of the past haunt the present? How could contemporary painting index the vanishing points in the lives and consciousness of the modern subject?
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