STATEMENT OF WORK

I am building worlds through fragments. 

Reality feels abstract, broken into immaterial pieces of itself, reconstituted into a garden-scape. Passing through, I perceive a beauty or joy in the disoriented. I think of an experience of hyperstimulation: noises, scents, and sights overlap as pulses onto each other, canceling and affirming and confusing one another in their layering. Colliding, the senses emerge into a perplexing texture. In between physical space and states of mind, my paintings aim to give form to a similar intensity of experience. 

Currently, I am using collage to structure this experience. I start with canvas scraps - past paintings, pre-treated pieces, remnants from discarded works. Cutting, gluing, and weighing down, the work begins by creating an unstretched surface highly varied in texture. It ebbs and flows in one direction, then another, pieces added and removed from the front and back freely; it switches orientations and tilts before ultimately being stretched and painted with oil. Moves coalesce – coexisting palettes and mediated gestures, points of connection and disconnection, structures and meta-structures – I react to them, negating and affirming in a rich array of layers.

The definition of collage is to assemble parts into a new whole. But more than unity, I am interested in separateness, the impure, imperfect and ambivalent. Moments are fragmented constellations, adhered together through cycling time. Form crystallizes, then erodes. Material, graceful sludge. These paintings are likewise a patchwork of multiple states, where simultaneity ties together that which is heavy and light, depressed and elevated, empty and full, slow and fast. I aim to embody these qualities with an emotional tenor, then present them with a perceptual and material intensity. I want to envelop the viewer in a spatial existence that is fractured, where windows and pockets emerge and recede with a simultaneity and indeterminable scale.