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Our hands full or not:
The same abundance.
Our eyes open or shut:
The same light.
— Yves Bonnefoy
from "Tree Frogs at Evening"
The Curved Planks
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Prenaient ou non nos mains,
La même abondance.
Ouverts ou clos nos yeux,
La même lumière.
— Yves Bonnefoy
Les Rainettes, Le Soir
Les planches courbes |
By means of art, the incommunicable gains expression without ceasing to be a mystery. — Michel Seuphor
My work locates, activates, and investigates simultaneous intermediary spaces defined by dialectical relationships: figure/ground, organic/geometric, fluid/static, connection/isolation, 2-d/3-d, emotional/physical. This engagement of the work with "emptiness", together with the intimacy of the work, invites the viewer into a dialogue between interior and exterior spaces, offering a site of mediation between inner and outer.
Contextualizing the act of painting and myself as a painter in a fluid understanding of space, matter, and humanity as multidimensional, multifaceted, and interconnected, I obliquely raise philosophical questions of place, human connection and identity through resolutely material interrogation.
Within any given piece, my paint carries gesture, history, and reference. It carries the record of the movement of my finger, hand, arm — or speaks of another kind of formative event that occurred within the arena of the painting. Or in contrast, it raises questions about the story of its appearance. Through color, form, or feel it points to the natural world or the human body. Or it may relate to something within the painting itself.
Poetic concepts, such as meter, syntax, syllables, emphasis, are analogous to my work. And, in its placement of sounds within the context of space and time, music ranging from contemporary classical piano to John Cageís early percussion works to Tanya Tagaqís throat singing resonates with my work.
While the works on paper may serve as laboratory and reference material for the paintings on panels, they are not studies for the paintings, but rather discrete, primary, and resolved artworks in their own right. The interactive experience of working on the responsive, relatively fragile paper surface is in direct contrast to the experience of working on the physically impenetrable surface of the spatially solid panels.
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