"Memories Can’t Wait, Objects Can’t Die"

Abstract

"I employ the language of painting to investigate our phenomenological connection to the world and the perpetual transience of experience. Through a combination of materiality and image, my work portrays memories of objects, spaces, and people while being rooted in the tradition of painting. To offer a wholly comprehensible perspective, the subject matter of my work operates in three different modes, depicted in three series: Portraits, Readymades, and Excavations. I employ these different modes to explore our understanding of time and memory. Two of the series, the Readymades and the Excavations, are presented in my thesis exhibition. Though once created in the present, all the works reach into the past, acting as metaphors for memories and totems of experience. The locations where I work offer images, inspirations, and materials; the cities become their own medium in my art. The works presented were created in Alfred, NY and Düsseldorf, Germany. In the different cities, I paint portraits of people I meet. The portraits allow me to build connections and share space and time with someone. I also take photographs during the portrait session, and these photographs often are referenced in the Excavation paintings. My portraits exist as artifacts of a shared human connection; they depict my two-hour version of that person as we sat and talked on a particular day in a particular place. The Readymade paintings utilize found objects and found surfaces that I have gathered in the two cities, Alfred and Düsseldorf. I paint an object onto a surface, which reflects the cultural milieu of the locality. These paintings hint at 2 the stories of objects, and act like waypoints on a journey into the past. This work appears straightforward in the depiction of the objects, but hides meaning behind trompe l'oeil humor. My Excavation paintings compress time into a visual and textural aesthetic experience. They are paintings layered with collected paper ephemera and gouged back into. Paradoxically, the destructive act breeds creation and the material passes through a state of transformation. These paintings are always created with a specific image in mind. I build up layers of material and finally paint the image, only to excavate and erase this image, searching for, and failing to find, a truth within the material. The emphasis is on the surface, the space, and the color. These elements work together in the paintings to form a scrim of distorted information whose goal it is to bypass the logic of the brain and “come directly across onto the nervous system,” to quote Francis Bacon.1 The different working methods all revolve around the same idea and were created in service of this concept: our shifting existence on the edge of present and past. The body of work presented here is a rumination on the past two years. Two years of travel and change. Two years of experimentation, discovery, and challenges. Two years that have passed."