Gallery
Artist Statement
I am fascinated by the abundance and repetition in a society saturated with imagery, at the speed of which it is consumed, and the impact mass-production and dissemination still holds on how we understand the value of any given object. I view this common, yet complex environment as a landscape to observe and interpret.
My recent work has been focused on images and objects that are easily accessible, immediately recognizable, and that have a relationship to the representation of past-utopias. These include palm trees, used car ads, product catalogues, refrigerators, building materials, boxes, and other various found images. I choose these references as a way to address my interests in the uncanny as a condition, or near-schism, with the familiar. There is a kind of idealism and dark-humor in prompting the viewer to look for even more meaning in an object or image that is so readily known and unremarkable. My intention with imagery is not to invite a past-due sense of nuance or overlooked importance, but to orient the viewer towards a perspective where they are questioning the objective reality of an object before them.
This prompt dovetails with my exploration between spatial structures and the language of reproduction. My background as a printmaker continues to inform my work as the preoccupation with the original and the multiple persists despite the materials I work with. I play with the expectations of reading familiar images by employing strategies of fiction, mimesis, and the spatial organization of collage. This direct engagement with illusion, the slippery slope in regards to its authenticity, and its relationship to the history of representation creates opportunities for me to explore different modes of production freely. As an interdisciplinary artist, my work in print, collage, sculpture, and painting holds a high regard for the traditions of how things are made, even if the end results are to undermine those specific histories in order to achieve new problems from which to confront a past or current tradition.
The two images included are from an ongoing series of process-focused prints called Rinse, Lather, Repeat. These images are created by using two different printmaking processes, inkjet and screen printing. My interest in combining these to methods on a singular image is to two play between the way each technology imparts its unique mark-making characteristics to created a formally complicated space. I have combined
images from various sources, including U-line catalogues, car repair manuals from the 1980’s, and found photography using digital collage. Both images also use digital drawing elements and erasures to build and subtract from the picture plane, revealing deeper levels of the collage below. R, L, R No 3. (Sparkplug) layers images of scanned plywood beneath a sequence of images of a progressively fouled sparkplug. R, L, R No. 7 (Rainbow Tape) layers images of office supplies and packaging within the expanded space of an engine block. The schism between the screen print and the inkjet processes are most exaggerated in this composition with the poor translation of the CMYK printing process most prevalent in the central blue color field.