Brad Cooper Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

When we visually experience a person, place, or object, we come away remembering the experience as a culmination of fragments that make up a whole. For instance when we think of someone we know, our mind does not create a picture of the person from head to toe, but instead, remembers minute details like the nape of their neck, or how their lip curled when they talked. These visual fragments are layered in our minds to remember the whole person.

I have attempted to recreate this experience with the systematic transfer from photography to paint. Similar to the ideas of the Cubists, I attempt to present a situation that gives a sense of physicality and environment. Inspired by the work of Sol Lewitt, I set up a game board and the act of painting is not to attack the canvas, but rather to simply play the game. I use the figure as an element, which allows me to investigate the innate qualities of paint, focusing on how it can describe the feeling of flesh and light. This process allows me to analyze, dissect and reconstruct the body as both subject and object, leading the viewer to a new understanding of the geography of the corporeal terrain. What is left on the canvas is the result of what happens when reality is processed through the mind and remembered as a new reality.

Painting has died a thousand deaths, but has always re-emerged wearing a new cloak. By riding the line between traditional techniques in painting and new conceptual ideas of making art, my goal is to be an integral part of where painting finds itself in the first half of the 21^st Century.

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