Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Influenced by the history of landscape and vanitas painting, I am interested in making art that brings the viewer into a deeper connection with the preciousness of time. My interpretation of vanitas takes contemporary imagery as its subject: fast cars, dance music and common symbols of death and rebirth- the money tree, a forest, calacas, a heart, a rose, a butterfly, a rainbow. I’m not interested in the original image but rather, the copied & reusable, the remembered & mis-remembered. The readymade and common image has a power that has been invested in over time and generations.
The painting "Filled with Song" bears the title of the complete set of drawings. I made the series of 97 drawings as a nightly ritual, pulling singular moments from the day as a source or a beginning to an image. A text I read: James Baldwin, Jennifer Tseng, Yan Ge, Kathy Acker & Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. (The drawings "Rose" and “I scarcely know how to describe that room…”) A long walk through the woods alone at night. A horror movie. (the drawings "Lightless Landscapes") A flashback of desire. The feeling of longing. (The drawing "Dedication Hour") The sky, a cloud churning, a horizon heavy with red, the underground. Using the space of a landscape as a metaphor for death, memorializing a friend’s passing. ("Reincarnation")
I look to the landscape because it holds so much. The history and future. I return to drawing as a primary language, a communication that is pre-lingual, beyond language– broken and complicated. It reflects my lived experience. Yet the drawings are neither autobiographical nor strictly representational. They exist as meditations on transience. Beyond this, I draw from direct observation, from my experiences being in nature, and from my dreams & memory.
The drawings generate the large format paintings. I draw and paint very fast. I find the speed simplifies composition and narrative. I use dry brushing and very little medium or solvents in the application of the paint. This process approximates the feeling of drawing on paper with charcoal and pastel in its directness and immediacy, leaving little space for subtraction.