STATEMENT : COLLAGE PAINTINGS
These collages are comprised of acrylic paint on paper and archival digital photographs that depict the natural environment of the remote northern coast of California where I grew up, as well as industrial cities where I’ve lived, Oakland, CA and Brooklyn, NY. I make painted surfaces using brushes, my fingers, and by pouring and shifting acrylic medium. The momentum evident within the marks– whether chaotic, kinetic energy or calm, subtle gradations, relates to thoughts and feelings of these places. By cutting, ripping, and recombining imagery I reorder incongruent visual ideas, arranging disparate colors, shapes, and textures until I find “rightness” in the composition. This process allows me to tap into unknown and unexpected visual and psychological territories.
The resulting collages reference natural, industrial, and imagined space. In the process of culling specific imagery, I want to understand how it is possible to be in many places at once (psychically) and how distinct experiences in distant places and time can overlap and be confined to one space inside of me and within one composition. My work is to manifest a visual representation of the complexities of attachment to place– to what is gone and what is still present in the form of memory.
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STATEMENT: FIGURE PAINTINGS
I am drawn to the idea of context: of an individual’s place within the whole; how figures relate to each other and abstract, colored fields.
The imagery I choose to work with comes from candid photographs and video I have taken of various settings and situations from my daily surroundings. I paint figures from the shots in order to highlight moments where meaningful interactions take place, either between figures or between the figure and his or her environment.
I paint gesturally, allowing my improvised marks to reflect the messiness and kinetic energy or calm of the moment. I layer these by pouring, drawing and painting on paper. Colors of nature, lime and leaf greens, luminous, pale yellow, white, and deep blues, contrast with colors of industry, magenta reds, acid green, purple, and cement gray.
Figures occupy multiple levels of the picture plane within each painted abstract field. The surrounding fields reference imagined space– both emotional and psychological. These figures and spaces represent themes of uncertainty, danger, and hope I see in contemporary urban life.