STATEMENT OF WORK

Over the past three years I have made paintings that use cutting and sewing as central compositional techniques. This generally happens by trimming a larger painting in half or sewing smaller cut fragments of paintings with other remnant pieces. The pieces joined and the cut paintings often occur years after they were individually painted. This time away from the older paintings restores them to be ripped apart, cut, and sewn; treating the canvas as a non-precious object, available to be freely used for another painting. With this approach, paintings are built from collaged parts and cohesive painterly material buildup that is disrupted and reorganized across various periods of time.

Most integral to my paintings is the application of paint to an unprimed canvas. With this technique, paint is able to recede through the surface onto the floor the painting is painted on, creating an indirectly painted backside by chance that is then flipped inside out and stretched as the front. This process creates a front and back that co-generates each other, making the canvas a transparent receptor rather than a pristine surface holding one side of a well-formed image. Fronts, backs, insides, and outsides become part of the picture plane resulting in soft and delicate worn painterly works; sewn together with multifarious sequences, repetitions, patterns, and evolutions.

Altogether, these methods of cutting, sewing, and reversing sides; produce paintings that are individually conceived based on the simultaneous and dissonant circumstances from which they are built. The process points to the new meanings that can be created from the ways divergent marks, surfaces, and supports can be reorganized into a unified singular whole. It is my hope that the process which a painting goes through can shed light on the nature of perception and embodied change.