Artist Statement
In my work I examine the possibilities of figurative painting to both extend and compress descriptive time. I seek to highlight this task by allowing my narration to layer and slip, depicting the dense compression of time in contemporary culture. I am particularly interested in the tempo and speed of our present moment and the effects this enacts on memory and perspective. I feel my generation experiences space and time as both past and present–at once near and then rendered in the digital to feel simultaneously removed and far.
In our moment, we are inundated with visual information that renders our ability to understand and process experience, as well as our sense of time and perspective, haphazard if not indeed skewed. My paintings begin here and assert the idea of looking at and through such a fractured pictorial space. I then begin to question how figural information might exist within this frame. My research manifests itself in a series of gestural marks that sit somewhere between drawing and painting; between the quick note-to-self one makes in order to jot down an idea, and the more prolonged meditation on the parts of daily life that, for some unknowable reason, affix themselves to the back of one’s mind and kick about with an unnerving permanence. This, a mix of the personal and the shared, or collective provides an experiential basis and context for my paintings.
