Words

Erased Landscapes

I often distrust painting. Yet I continue to paint and examine my lived experience through the filter of painterly abstraction. I approach every painting as a visualization problem, an exercise in building and renovation. Each work is a composite of forces, fictions, and fragments.

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 idea 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 rewrite the stories to which we cling?  As I filter these questions through competing layers of observation and abstraction, structures emerge and dissolve that I find unique to painting.  These structures are typically architectural and/or transitional.  Many have a hybrid appearance, part interior and part exterior.  They are often drawn from spaces between the built environment and the natural world, where our bodies experience shifts from artificial to natural light, from warmth to cold, or from stormy conditions to calm. 

My paintings reimagine place.  They contemplate the impact of the built environment on the human condition.  How do places and events from our past inform our current sense of place, our sense of belonging?  How can we harness our lived experience and transform loss into recovery? 

Prior to the pandemic, the spaces and structures in the Erased Landscape series tended to be uninhabited.  There was a sense of vacancy, an openness waiting to be occupied.  Over the last few years, as feelings of isolation, anxiety and loneliness peaked, faceless figures began appearing in the paintings.  This marked an unprecedented shift, one that continues to prompt new questions.  How do these figures impact the spaces within the paintings and change the narrative?  At a time when everyone’s autonomy is being cross-examined, my reflections on place are becoming more psychologically charged.