“cause a bore is a straight line that finds a wealth in division” 

from Lou Reed, Some Kind of Love

 

“Years ago, I came across a piece of a tree branch, which had grown through a chain-link fence—a fairly common sight throughout the city. The branch had been cut on each side of the property divider, remaining trapped in the matrix of the galvanized steel fabric. This memory, revisited regularly, has lodged itself in my consciousness and has informed my practice in ways that continue to surprise and engage me. The realization that a boundary, or a division, is a place of action, dimension, and consequence is central to my ongoing body of work.

 

With this current group of paintings, the doubling of panels, along with the unpainted, X-ed out anti-figures, serve to suspend the viewer’s centered, subjective attention in a state of tension. The lack of a central figure, and the fissure of the picture plane keeps the viewer unanchored and free to explore any routes that the design might lead them down—a narrative in the making.

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One possible impetus for a narrative—my predilection for using found materials, which I see as a kind of collaboration with chance—plays front and center in these paintings. Whether bought second hand on Ebay or at the Salvation Army, cast-off from my own wardrobe or literally found on the sidewalk, the various fabrics that I use as a support for the paintings are a way to ‘start’ with a narrative already in motion, and a symbolic refuting of the notion of the tabula rasa.

 

The dynamic interaction of color, composition, and materiality, between                                      

the ‘found’ and the ‘intentional’, are firmly rooted in the formalist tradition.

 However, a healthy dose of chance and whim are allowed to unfold in a space of ‘important play’, to borrow an expression from the artist, Jonathan Lasker. The paintings often go through several revisions and take unexpected turns in their making, as I bounce the ‘found’ against the ‘chosen’, the incidental off the intentional. The effective residue of this (often binary) back and forth—a kind of hashing-out of the

composition—settles comfortably into a painterly language, continually evolving within its own prescribed limitations.”