Artist Statement
Details— from de-, indicating a separation, and tailler, “to cut”— are the focus of my artistic research. In drawing, painting and interdisciplinary works, I have investigated moments of separation, where a part becomes defined by its exclusion from a larger whole. Subjects such as a newspaper clipping, a graphite mark, appliqué fabric or a single page (among others) have compelled me to interrogate shifting boundaries between an object and its context. In the past year, my interest in details has led me to combine paint, photographs and drawings pulled from different contexts into the same space. These painting objects reflect my desire to conceive of the painting space neither as a window, a wall, a mirror, nor a screen, but rather as a network of fragments in which different elements collaborate with, contradict or inform one another.

This process of bringing various materials into the same space premises my most recent work, shown in my submitted images. In these works, the materials collide. In “Char,” for instance, painted borders and curling black fragments overlap a pair of identical Xeroxed photographs of a fire and of a dog. The ways that these images function, and what meanings they point to, are negotiated in the moment of overlap. I am interested in this site of collision and in the resulting tensions it provokes, including those between traditional painting and collage materials, between photographic and handmade content and between narrative and abstract imagery. My hope is that these tensions do not exist as markers of a simplistic dichotomy, such as old/new or subjective/objective, but instead speak to the inherent ambiguities of one discipline (or one medium) at the meeting place of another.

While different elements within the painting space impact one another, I am also mindful of how each painting object instructs another. As a result, I work primarily in series in which forms, images or ideas are often repeated over several paintings. The last five of my submitted pieces are from a body of work titled “Doc,” made in the Fall of 2010 and named after a drawing of a torn (and truncated) document. In these works, the painting surface joins together different details to form a new context. The first five submitted images constitute my most recent series, “Obs,” named from both the abbreviation “obs.,” which in one definition refers to an observatory or a “position affording an extensive view,” and short for “obstruct.” This seeming contradiction suggested to me that the piling up of images and materials—often diminishing or negating the image itself—might itself allow for a different and more extensive view.

In both bodies of work, the content is at times highly specific, as in the gravestone images I took in “Obs;” or political, as in a newspaper image of Abu Ghraib and in photographs I took at the World Trade Center protests in September, 2010 in “Shipwreck.” They are not meant to be didactic. Instead, the tone and content of each element determines one another and the meanings exist in this relation. In these painting objects, a vocabulary of cross-outs, cover-ups and overlaps articulate my desire to make work whose meaning cannot be given as a sentence or summary, but can only be made with an effort of imagination.