What are my paintings about?
They are maps. They locate things within a space and form sets of relationships between things in the world. They are about the freedom to choose and decide, to create meaning by doing so, as an existential and political act..
They function as discursive formations between images, gestures, signs, symbols, in a fluid, contingent and multi-layered network of meanings and possible relationships. They incorporate, on the same picture plane, a mixture of historical reference, auto-biography and sub-cultural content in a shifting soup of knowledge, conjecture, opinion, guesswork, and the irrational. This interpenetration occurs when the histories of abstract mark making, an ongoing developing iconography and sub-cultural motifs are placed in relationships on the picture plane. The ‘arena’ of the picture plane (although implying one section of an infinite extension via hinted at grids), is a site of conflict for a merging of emotional states, conceptual ideas, memories and autobiography, where the notion of knowledge and understanding is contested. The connections between ‘events’ within that space create potential new relationships of meaning that accept uncertainty and the possibility of failure.
Disparate elements (of mark, motif, image and gesture) allow for a networking of possibilities, a web akin to the nature of the Mind, that reflect the problem-solving and pattern recognition search of our innate way of existing in the world. Any inherent cohesion is hermetic, oft times illogical, but is reformulated by the active participation of the mind viewing it. This is not an acceptance of the ’subjective’, as an all-is-acceptable interpretation, but rather a realism-based acknowledgment of the non-linear and cultural set of the brain’s ordering processes.
The paintings therefore exist as a set of questions and possibilities that offer up multiple avenues for non-didactic exchanges of potentialities. Within this structure autobiography sits side-by-side with political critique, art history ruminations alongside games of interpretation. Meaning is based on truth being diverse and conflicted, on strategies of associative connection and cultural structures that avoid essentializing contexts. This allows for an extended and negotiated dialogue between ideas of the political and class division, race, sub-cultural resistance and tribalism, via a curatorial-type selection and arrangement on the picture plane.
They are maps. They locate things within a space and form sets of relationships between things in the world. They are about the freedom to choose and decide, to create meaning by doing so, as an existential and political act..
They function as discursive formations between images, gestures, signs, symbols, in a fluid, contingent and multi-layered network of meanings and possible relationships. They incorporate, on the same picture plane, a mixture of historical reference, auto-biography and sub-cultural content in a shifting soup of knowledge, conjecture, opinion, guesswork, and the irrational. This interpenetration occurs when the histories of abstract mark making, an ongoing developing iconography and sub-cultural motifs are placed in relationships on the picture plane. The ‘arena’ of the picture plane (although implying one section of an infinite extension via hinted at grids), is a site of conflict for a merging of emotional states, conceptual ideas, memories and autobiography, where the notion of knowledge and understanding is contested. The connections between ‘events’ within that space create potential new relationships of meaning that accept uncertainty and the possibility of failure.
Disparate elements (of mark, motif, image and gesture) allow for a networking of possibilities, a web akin to the nature of the Mind, that reflect the problem-solving and pattern recognition search of our innate way of existing in the world. Any inherent cohesion is hermetic, oft times illogical, but is reformulated by the active participation of the mind viewing it. This is not an acceptance of the ’subjective’, as an all-is-acceptable interpretation, but rather a realism-based acknowledgment of the non-linear and cultural set of the brain’s ordering processes.
The paintings therefore exist as a set of questions and possibilities that offer up multiple avenues for non-didactic exchanges of potentialities. Within this structure autobiography sits side-by-side with political critique, art history ruminations alongside games of interpretation. Meaning is based on truth being diverse and conflicted, on strategies of associative connection and cultural structures that avoid essentializing contexts. This allows for an extended and negotiated dialogue between ideas of the political and class division, race, sub-cultural resistance and tribalism, via a curatorial-type selection and arrangement on the picture plane.