Broad
I am wondering what it means to translate the world between dimensions (1,2,3,4,etc.) and between the virtual and the physical. What types of distortions happen in translation? What new forms are created in the movement between dimensions and states?
Paint
I use the construction of paintings as an attempt to recognize how my understanding of the world might be impacted by the types of images available to us today, and the ways that we receive them–particularly images that are generated outside the visual register and their reception through the screen. Looking at forms of image production made available through the digital, I try to systematically rebuild the images in hopes that the collaboration with the qualities of a material might express a new way of understanding the initial picture. This act of translation and re-construction attempts to take advantage of painting’s ability to describe retinal impressions- to speak to the surface of things (what we can and cannot know through observation) and the way we impose our mind/knowledge/history/culture onto that surface.
I hope that the paintings, which move between the private spaces of the domestic to the public spaces of surveillance, can reflect on the distancing and equalizing affect that technologically produced images can have on subjects, as well as the way that we, as people, become abstracted and analyzed. I am trying to get the paintings to hold between object and image, form and formlessness, and abstraction and representation, so that a viewer might question what the painting is giving versus what they are imposing on the object, and so one might become less certain about the meaning of pictures; or the ways that pictures create meaning; or meaning…
(short)
My recent paintings investigate the translation of the visual world through the lens, machine, and, finally, the screen. I am interested in the equalizing impact of the photograph and the screen, where all information, regardless of classification, flows through the same system, and where, involuntarily, a collective unconscious of the image might develop- not in content, but in form, or the formal. Utilizing the slowness of painting I work to further explore the conditions of the image, and, through the material conditions of paint, try to draw out latent meaning, and subtle tone generated from new ways of looking at and capturing information.
(a dialectic)
Thesis- We can know the world through images (we know the world though the senses)
Antithesis- We cannot know the world through images (we do not know the world through the senses)
Synthesis- Images can tell us what we cannot know about our world through images (senses can tell us the things that we cannot know about the world through the senses)
New thesis- Images, those things framed and cut from the visual field, can remind us of what we cannot know through vision (the limits of what we can know through the senses), and can guide us to “know” the world in other ways (through other senses? Or beyond senses?)
Alternate thesis- We cannot know the world
(a thought)
The idea that technological advancement has taken away all that was mysterious to the human condition. Creating a new, different, and alternative set of mysteries.
(another thought)
The attempt to make an object that reflects a response to an image.
(a challenge)
Make something as absurd, curious, and occasionally beautiful as the times we live in.