Artist Statement No. 1 (Conventional)

I am resistant to calling myself a painter, even though I almost always make paintings. I use painting because it allows me to deploy seemingly opposing strategies simultaneously. We are persistently forced to negotiate between our very human predisposition towards meaning and the fabricated materiality of the world at large. Similarly, my paintings situate themselves at a point of confliction—between the impressionability of atmospheric abstraction and a state of rigid representation. I am interested in paintings being able to operate both as windows of idiosyncratic difference and as pieces of capital.


My choice to engage this middle-ground—to play both ‘sides’—is not driven by apathy but active ambivalence, a desire for the paintings to alternately foster a meditative encounter and be submissive to social space. This shifting is largely dependent not only on the make-up of the paintings, but also on the context in which the work is situated. By emphasizing the relative nature of the work and its reception, I also would like to direct attention towards the relative nature of our perception in general. It want the works to be emptied out or full of information or both. They are pregnant, not yet birthing—absent in their presence. Fittingly, the paintings are mostly moderate in scale—large enough to approximate our bodies, yet small enough to be easily transportable.


Shown in isolation and dim lighting works to emphasize the ethereality and nebulous nature of the paintings’ images. The fields of foggy color and unfocused forms begin to more overtly reference the transcendental tendencies of someone like Rothko. I want the experience of looking slowly at each painting to be akin to looking up at the clouds; how they locate our bodies in space and encourage free-association. More recently, I have begun to create soundtracks for individual paintings. This sound has become a way to further exaggerate and distort their atmospheric qualities, blending clichés of ambient music with white noise.


Shown en masse, the paintings become prop-like, generic illustrations of ‘abstract painting.’ They are still actual paintings (obviously), however, their standardized scale and plastic decal-like surfaces begin to call attention to their fabrication and the serial nature of their production. They are no longer just pictorial anomalies or windows of difference; they are manufactured goods, mobile and easily relegated to the periphery. One painting’s inconsistencies and individuality become compromised and flattened by its neighbors’. In effect, the personal turns impersonal. The subject becomes the background. In this mode of display, the works are either hung tightly together or stacked in groups on the floor or leaned against a wall. By obfuscating the surfaces through stacking and leaning, I wish to emphasis the paintings as objects or units, to impair their status as Painting.