STATEMENT OF WORK

I've always been attracted to the complexity of modular synthesizers. Their dozens of switches and knobs with tangled patch cords trigger strange otherworldly sounds that feel abstract and contemplative.  

The modular synthesizer became the perfect vehicle for me to talk about a radical theory of reality in a book called "The Case Against Reality" by a UC Irvine professor named Donald Hoffman. In it, he reminds us that we don't see reality as it truly is. Instead we create or invent a mental map or mental model of reality. He claims that we are mistaking our map for reality. So the synthesizers are metaphors for how we create this model of reality. Perception is a kind of interface with the real using all sorts of metaphoric switches and dials to create a "map" of what our senses detect. In some of the paintings many well known visual illusions are used like the vase/face illusion and the duck/rabbit illusion. They point out how the viewer must decide which version of the image, or in other words, which mental model they prefer to see. The book goes on to suggest that even our idea of space and time can also be seen as a mental model or mental map that we have invented. The synthesizers are superimposed on various curtains in the paintings. The curtains suggest that our mental map is actually obstructing our consciousness from something deeper. This is similar to hindu ideas of "Maya" where the world that one experiences is seen as misleading as far as its true nature is concerned.

The synthesizers depicted are the heralded Emerson Moog Modular and the Buchla 100 from the late 1960's, and the Serge Paperface, and the E-MU Modular System from early 70's. They all have their roots in a convergence of cold war government research and the Psychedelic era of the 1960's. They are technical fetes of engineering that want to "plug-in"  and connect with some type of mysterious deeper reality. 

The painting of the Emerson Moog Modular doubles its width as a mirrored image of the instrument. It creates a larger and more symmetrical composition that gives the painting a more secure and ordered composition like that of a  traditional European religious painting. Its modular components, dials, and ports create a machine-like order and dense abstract rhythm while its orange and blue cables curve and dance like the curvy lines of paint of a Brice Marden abstraction. Its scale envelopes the viewer like the theatricality of a Renaissance fresco. Some areas of the painting also dissolve into textured abstract pattern that reminds the viewer of visualized sound waves or some sort of glitch in the curtain's illusion.  The theater backdrop support of the painting furthers Hoffman's ideas by referencing the invented nature of the stage. 
 
A merging takes place in all the paintings where the complexity of science and engineering fuses with an ethereal tone of classical European religious painting intertwined with modern traditions of abstraction and psychedelic visions of reality.