This was my first solo show at New Image after years of being in group shows in Marcia's space. This show was a breaking point for me, I wanted to create a show where every moment spent working on the show was spent physically making marks. No driving, no printing, no talking on the phone or sourcing fabricators on the internet. I wanted all the efforts of production to be present in the final work.
The pieces are physical and wandering in subject matter. The images come out of doodles and sketches that appear out of the moments when I was confronted by blank paper sitting in front of me. I wanted the paintings to appear both absent minded yet well crafted. This work was important to me, as it represents when I begin to feel comfortable with showing work that was not mechanical or super clean. One aspect of what I do is very loose and illustrative, which I has been appearing in my commercial work for years.
The most important pieces for me in this show were the "Web of Lies" paintings. There were two woven paper paintings "Web of Lies #1" and "Web of Lies #2". At the time I was spending a lot of time writing poetry, and thinking about how language can rhyme and experimenting with making visual rhymes. The woven web-paintings are done with paper, some of the lines are painted directly onto the ground, others are glued onto the surface, often spiraling into three dimensional space. The final piece is both abstract and familiar, it feels like something you have seen before and at the same time seems to be an image that is pretending to be familiar. Like all the near-strangers I am "friends" with on Facebook. These pieces are the closest thing I have created to "Visual Poems" where the image or in this case the "lines" rhyme. |
