Words

Erased Landscapes

I am drawn to the problems and promises of painting.  Yet, in many ways, I distrust painting and question its viability in our digital age.  I paint as a way of interrogating my own lived experience and trying to hold onto my sense of place.  What is it specifically about painting that sustains my interest and imagination? Painting provides a mirror (reflection), a lens (observation), and a filter (analysis). It can be fictive and fragmentary, absorptive and adaptive.

My paintings reimagine place.  They contemplate the impact of the built environment on the human condition.  How does society influence our sense of belonging?  How do places and events from our past shape our present?  How can we harness our lived experiences and memorialize them in some way?  Memory is an overactive “GPS” that constantly recalibrates to help us better understand where we are and move us from one place to another.  But unlike satellite technology, memory can omit and misappropriate.  It can tease and haunt.

In his book The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, Dylan Trigg observes, “Memory and imagination work together to produce a mutated past, often in tension with the anonymous reality of the past.”  This concept of “a mutated past,” one that is both real and imagined, lies at the conceptual core of my ongoing work.  How is it that our sense of recall can mutate our past?  Does our imagination support memory or erode it?  As I filter these questions through competing layers of observation and abstraction, structures emerge and dissolve that are unique to painting.  Many of these structures and spaces are architectural and transitional.  They have a hybrid appearance, part interior and part exterior.  They are drawn from spaces between the built environment and the natural world, where the body experiences a shift from artificial to natural light, from the warmth to the cold, or from stormy conditions to calm. 

I think a lot about the imprint that living leaves on the world and the capacity for painting to commemorate one’s individuality and lived experience as a visual image.  My work wrestles with issues of loss and recovery.  Prior to the pandemic, the spaces and structures in my work were always uninhabited.  There was a sense of vacancy, an openness waiting to be filled.  Over the last few years, as feelings of isolation, anxiety and loneliness peaked, faceless human figures have begun to occupy some of the spaces and structures in my work.  This marks an unprecedented change for me, one that continues to raise new questions and reanimate my studio practice.  Where are these figures coming from and how do they navigate this painted world?  How do they impact place and change the narrative?  At a time when everyone’s autonomy is being cross-examined, my sense of place is becoming more psychologically charged.

Summer, 2023