STATEMENT OF WORK

My work considers painting as a physical and material site for the mediation of space and experience. The painting surfaces often appear worn and weathered, implying a history of physical change. They are variously stained, sewn, built up, and often not straight. The canvas is sometimes stretched around irregular supports, enacting an imperfect or slanted relationship to the modernist cartesian grid and the idealized horizon line of landscape painting’s history. I believe that material movements and formal working out of space can enact metaphors about time, accumulation, touch, and experience. Some of the surfaces make space for found materials, visibly brushing up against history, such as abandoned quarries. Indexical rock rubbings reference the texture of this site-specificity, marking a time and a place. Each painting demands a different way of working: dyeing enters the weave of the canvas, as rust lodges in a riverbed. Bleaching reverses the dye, but it does so imperfectly.  I am always considering the relationship of oil paint, dye, bleach, and acrylic paint to weight, and the heaviness and lightness of objects, colors, and materials. The collapse of the metaphor of weight with the real weight of stones and the displacement of natural objects is the space I wish for the paintings to inhabit.