Open studio: Instances of resistance

This photo montage is another piece in the Instances of Resistance series where I search out and photograph feral plant life growing among human construction / ruins.

I've used some of the same digital photos as the smaller pieces on paper below. The difference is that the photos in the large piece are printed on fabric, montaged onto a raw canvas and over-stitched using the sewing machine.

Instance of Resistance #10: Feral greenery in the underground city
digital photos on fabric over-stitched onto canvas
3' x 4'

Here's a detail of some of the stitching:



Below are a couple of the ones I printed onto Bristol Board then drew over with a soft-lead pencil.

I chose drawing as the medium because I wanted to put my own hand into the photos and make a connection between the role of subjectivity in my art practice and the un-tameable, rogue plant-life. I also thought that drawing would be the best way to animate the plants with playful and caricature-like personas.

I enjoy how these pieces invoke nostalgia (a theme in my work) with their simultaneously shadowy presence and candy-like preciousness.

Instance graffiti #4: 11 feral plants, 8 twigs and 1 cross-beam in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

Instance graffiti #1: 12 feral plants among others in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

April First Friday and Random Aerials

I showed 10 Aerials at this month's First Friday, including some newer paintings with the ones I've been working on over the past several months.

Random Aerial #1: Water, desert and ocean with no city
mixed-media on panel
48" x 56"

Above is one of the older pieces and below one of the newer (and possibly still in-progress) pieces. Both are part of the Random Aerial series. On the painting below, I didn't use any topographical media (fabric or paper) to sculpt and give dimension to the surface as I did with the top piece.

Random Aerial View #3: Pastoral Kaleidoscope
mixed-media on panel
24' x 24'

The Pastoral Kaleidoscope is an abstracted agrarian landscape that suggests dynamic motion though the patterning is flattened and the viewer's orientation to the picture plane is static / perpendicular.

Here's a side view of the gallery box construction:



I constructed all the boxes myself from oak... hand mitered the corners, secured the plywood panel and finished the wood with a natural stain and buffed wax. The panels themselves are finished with 6 coats of sanded and damp burnished gesso.

October open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am.
Image from L.A. Trees #1 and Picture Postcards with Skylines

This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I'm interested in how an individual experience of a particular place is mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and experiences of other places – both real and imagined.

Formally, the work plays with stillness and sequences / place and time. For instance, still photography is paired with written narrative in L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse). Although the video medium affords a more time-based approach, movement through this particular palm-treed space has been frozen with a short sequence of photos at sunset. This stillness allows the narrative captioning to be the driving element that marks time.

In Picture Postcards with Skylines, the medium has been similarly altered. The sequence of digital images marks not only the subtle changes in two different landscapes (CA and TN) over a period of a few minutes, but constructs a fragmented panorama of imaginary place. Powerlines intersecting the skies – accentuated with machine stitching – interrupt and fragment the postcard quality of the photos and draw the two places together.

Green is the Color of my Nostalgia plays with abstraction as a parallel to incomplete memory and the psychological processes that perfect and limit recollection. Here I have created a single representation of two mountain spaces (The Smoky and Santa Monica Mountains) and their details from memory. The choice of materials (cheesecloth, plastic, etc) combined with sparse drawing and machine stitching reinforces the feeling of impossibility that occurs when trying to match physical places to my memories of them.