Notes | Mysite

Silkscreen paintings:

Each work is composed of images ripped from their digital contexts, largely consisting of advertisements, historical images, and stock photos. Each of these images is chosen for its internal composition and its symbolic significance both offline and online. Through a process of flattening, compressing, and hollowing out the image dissolves, recontextualized into a crude facsimile of the original. I then apply these images to my own shoddy handmade silkscreens which functions as a sort of mechanical tool for composition making. The work is often defined by the opposing forces of bold viscerally colorful line forming the repetitive overplayed printing of my compressed images, and thin, often transparent, but occasionally solid and opaque washes and fields of color absorbing into the raw canvas. My process is guided by an initial idea or archetype, an operational plan, loose enough to allow an intuitive response to the painting. I proceed to print repeatedly, printing horizontally, I map the internal logic of the image’s composition through repeated layering, the composition displays a loose-knit collective of the original seemingly bland reference. These images are part of an ever-expanding network of cultural, spatial, and physical collisions happening all around us, vibrating, shifting, and colliding, making new sparks of meaning all the time.

Notes on painting (a non-exhaustive, and ever-growing list):

Composition: I think about composition quite a lot. I spend a lot of time outside of these paintings looking at and dissecting the structural and compositional elements of others’ work in order to ever expand my compositional syntax.
Parts or Bits: Often, and inexplicably, I will begin to focus on only one or two aspects of a given image. This doesn't mean that these are the only crucial aspect of the image which I am working with but seems to be more of an automatic essentializing of the form. After working with the image for an extended period of time the image begins to be quoted by pieces, rather than the whole itself, within my work.
Blocks: I sometimes accumulate these prints into contained blocks. These blocks ostensibly become figures of their own, while retaining some kind of individuality of each of the images. Blocks often represent movement, from here, to there, bridging gaps, spanning divides, creating dissonance; think of how a crowded room at a party interacts and this is often how I am pondering the interaction of multiple blocks within the work.
Circular or ovular form: It was pointed out to me by a good friend after looking at this body of work, that she saw a repetition of a central circular form composed of blocks of print, which then other elements swarmed around framing the initial print. I had not made that connection, but she was right. I think this is the result of using flattened facsimiles of human images. There is a kind of fleshy logic to the way limbs, heads, and knees sit in relation to one another. These repetitive undulating curves seem to lend themselves to a kind of broad circular form, even when I’ve mapped out a rigid or linear composition.
Multiplicity in the work: Manufactured sameness, a crude industrialized individuality. With the proliferation of tools for increased individuation, affording people greater control of their perceived self, we might assume that there would be an exponentially increasing variety of these perceived selves. It seems that the more power we exert over how we are perceived by others does not correlate necessarily with an expanded syntax of self-aesthetics. We have become widgets, phenotypes for amorphous archetypes aggregated across social structures. Blocks of mass-produced people (images) which map the internal landscape of a composition, assembled into a kind of loose-knit collective whose only association is a bland-similarity, a kind of conformity to one another.
A Machined Composition: I employ a process in which I am simply an operator of a machine conducting or organizing the image-making process. Each separate screen I employ has its function and internal logic, My goal, as the operator, is to understand how these components work, how to utilize them in relation to themselves, the substrate, and one another.
Machined Composition addendum: Each of the screens used to compose larger figures within the paintings begin to demonstrate a kind of compositional will of their own, an internal geometry that partially dictates how they will be used. Each of these navigates the spatial plane of work in unique and distinctive ways. It becomes my job to create a situation for these images to float within the work, colliding and overlapping intentionally and according to their compositional nature.