Artist Statement
Foremost, I am driven by a deep and unwavering love of painting – its history, its forms, its themes, its relevance, and its possibility. We talk a lot about painting. Alive or dead. Abstract or realist. Conceptual or expressive. Yet in binaries and absolutes there are gaps, wide chasms, that we bridge with assumption and misassumption. In my work, I attempt to explore these uncharted canyons of painting, peripheral and liminal, in order to expand its borders, to broaden both the appreciation and the role of painting in contemporary art-making.

Specifically, I shared images from a site-specific group of paintings made for a 2011 exhibition at White Columns. Singular works for sure, but also one piece when taken as a whole. The paintings are and represent artworks in a show, a group of new media works (videos, projections) amidst gallery fixtures (modernist furniture, pedestals, technological display devices). They include depictions of analogue and digital projection equipment (e.g. slide projectors, overhead projectors, video projectors, etc.) that are paired with painted representations of their projected images. For example a painting of an overhead projector is paired with a painted image of a projected text taken from Beckett’s ‘Molloy’. These paired canvases, installed in direct formal relationship to one another, establish plausible but unstable illusions and attempt to readdress how paintings may function within, and reactivate, space and time.

I took new media works as subjects, but moreover, I lifted their methodologies to explore what innovations their application in painting might engender. For instance, for a series called CCTV, I wanted to propose the possibility of editioned paintings, as with a photograph or print. I thought of the edition in relation to manifested works, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres' stacks or candy pieces, wherein each painting in the edition would be a manifestation of a concept loosely defined by the artist. Thus, I set a framework (in this work that each painting would be a TV screen depicting security footage) but ultimately it would be the owners who would decide the final forms of the works. Specifically, the owner chooses the site of the camera, though has no say over the 'footage' captured in the final painting, setting up a collaboration between owner and artist recalling renaissance patronage, but invoking the element of chance present in conceptual interactive work.

Taken as whole, the exhibition is a thesis of sorts. History paintings that rather than depict government or church, take art historical movements, design aesthetics and technological eras as their subjects. Didactics about the history and fabrication of paintings. For instance, the entire show encompasses an overview of the different philosophical approaches to image making (landscape, color field, abstract, sublime, text painting, minimalism, realist, etc), and liberalizes the essential nature of paintings - as depictions of light. And though they formally appear cold or conceptual from afar, like tight photorealistic representations, in actuality as one steps closer, both the ideas and their renderings break apart and reveal a humble clumsiness. There is a purposeful tender anti-facility, a painterly humanism. They are both intellectually serious and banal, funny and sad, democratic and wholly optimistic about the enduring importance and vitality of painting.