ARTIST STATEMENT

Looking beyond the façade of everyday cityscape, these paintings use the back of the urban construction, the tight alley in between and the warehouse on the periphery as their starting point. Common motifs shared by these places transcend the boundaries of specific locales. While familiar architecture oftentimes creates tattletale pin pointers, unassuming places within the urban landscape are collectively akin and virtually interchangeable. Regardless of where, the functionality of the city as a living organism manifests itself in everyday activities like waste removal, territorial markings, and simple structural restoration. As these events conspire, a language is created that speaks beyond the instance. Combined with natural decay, socioeconomic conditions and accidental happenings, a new dialogue emerges between the object and the observer.

The synthesis of metaphorical representation and the formal aspects of modernism in my work echo the tension present in the visual world.  The intersection of order and randomness, tangible reality and ambiguity and rest and tension are also key coordinates from which my paintings locate their meaning. My relationship to content is somewhat paradoxical: I wish to simultaneously consider it, ignore it, embed it with meaning and abstract it. By taking my work through a process of filtering, editing and associating, the finished pieces are removed several steps from direct observation and recording, emphasizing the visual dilemma between what is believable and what is not.  Experience, socialization and instincts aid us in defining opposites, what we believe to be true. By demonstrating that some binaries can invert their polarities, or even collapse into a single unit, my work tests the notion that reality is as dualistic.  As objects, the paintings offer up a “signifying third,” or magnetic bond, where one reading cannot exist without the other.  This back and forth phenomenon is mirrored in how each image is taken to the very edge of non-representation and allowed to circle back towards “re-representation.” I see this process as ongoing, spiraling forward instead of circling to its beginning.  By setting up opposites and attempting to find commonalities linking them together, I deliver the viewer closer to the way we ingest our surroundings. Drawing upon past experience and seeing something for the first time, these paintings offer a reading that is at once a part and apart.