Artist Statement No. 2 (Interview)

You have hesitated to call yourself a painter, why is that?

I think the main reason is that, for me, painting is a means to an end. It is not a passion, or an obsession—although I do obsess over my paintings—but rather it is a means to an end. Painting has simply been the best medium in which to manifest my conceptualizations.

You still make your paintings by hand, with a brush? That seems rather traditional or redundant.

Yes, I still make them by hand, with little brushes and little tubes of paint. In that respect, it is pretty traditional stuff. However, the way that I paint ends up masking my process to some degree. In the final works my hand and my labor are tamped down, rendered mute; they are barely there. Just as visible are the plastic surfaces and their crisp separation from the canvas supports. The conceptual crux of my work lies in the paintings’ ability to function in various contexts as “paintings.” Because of this, it has been important to utilize standardized or traditional modes of painting and fetishize those modes of production. In doing so, the paintings in effect become hyper-paintings or representations of themselves, something like a prop. Yet, they are still very much paintings.

Can you elaborate on what it means for the paintings to be able to function in various contexts as “paintings”? I’m confused.

Sure. It definitely can be slippery. I often use the term “paintings” with quotation marks. When I do this, I am referring to the potential for the works to not only function as unique paintings but also—by enforcing and exaggerating so many of the base characteristics of traditional notions of painting—each work is able to refer to Painting in a meta-sense. This leads to a duality in which the paintings also function as signs.

And?

Well, this allows for the paintings to somewhat effortlessly shift roles. It allows for the audience and context to, in effect, project themselves onto them.

If its about projection, why not just make white paintings?

I think that would probably tip the scale too much towards the work being signage or too emptied out. I am working towards a balance of sorts. I want there to be enough information in the paintings to promote the act of looking, while at the same time their images being quiet or nebulous enough to be almost arbitrary. My phrase for this is “absence in presence.” The weight of the paintings ends up moving in gradients, depending on context and viewership.

You often show individual paintings alone, but other times you stack or group the paintings in larger numbers as a mode of display. What is that about?

When I show individual paintings in isolation, it works to emphasize their atmospheric qualities and play to the transcendental characteristics of someone like Rothko. When they are shown en masse, their very production and status as objects is brought to the forefront. These two modes of display are essentially polar binaries. I also present the work in ways that merge these ideas and confuse their separation. My display strategies reiterate the flexibility I have built into the paintings. I think of this flexibility as being metaphorically related to how we, as individuals, shift our personalities and levels of engagement in order to cope with the world at large.