STATEMENT OF WORK

Mixing several stories into one representational composition that feels almost plausible as a single moment in time is, a signature of my recent work. I am not telling one story, precisely, but am describing the feeling of being within several different narratives, a perspective that is shifting and fluid, that for me is decidedly feminine.

As a female artist, interested in this peculiar moment in time, my work involves the newly familiar condition of being in constant juxtaposition with other virtual spaces, and I find myself longing for the human and the handmade. The essential reemergence of figuration and the creative playfulness of surrealism in art is something I’ve been anticipating ever since I first picked up a pencil.

Starting with saturated colored grounds—streaked, dripped, scratched—I build an architecture where physical patterning is the first chapter in a layering of marks and techniques. Color choices are sometimes painted transparently, revealing underlayers or blending with them. At other times, paint is applied with such thick relief that I carve into it, culling my interests in woodcut, lithography, drawing and ceramic sculpture. Large abstract gestures are in conversation with figurative realism, as one experience becomes several.

Sometimes my canvases are double-sided, angling two different narratives together in constant proximity. These sculptural works also have a cut-out opening, a literal “window” in the picture plane, inviting the outside world in and yielding an unpredictable multitude of relationships. Installations permit me to strategically locate one painting to be viewed through another and to choreograph a wedding of compositions from certain vantage points, a film-like story evolution that the observer can divine.

Using this visual game to push an open-ended collision of perspectives, and to engage the variable story within-a-story-within-a-story, my work continues to explore our understanding of time and personal point-of-view. In this rife political climate, I am questioning through my work, the notion of a basic “reality” and the possibility of a multitude of simultaneous “truths.”