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For me, painting is primarily a way of
thinking, of seeking insight, of examining and understanding aspects
of the world around me. Through my paintings I ask viewers very
simple but fundamental questions about the nature of perception
and about the various ways we project our desires onto the natural
world. I consider my work successful when it provokes thoughtful
questioning of assumptions by making familiar territory strange
and surprising.
When I am working in my studio, I do not think explicitly about
audience, but rather make paintings that have a particular physical
and intellectual effect on me, in the hope and belief that these
effects are accessible to other viewers as well. These viewing experiences
have to do with stability and instability, with the known and the
unknown, with order and confusion. At times, I triangulate with
my paintings, using them to create fixed visual reference points.
With them I survey and carefully build a ground plane on which to
stand, and from which to make the surrounding world seem comprehensible,
unified and whole. The moment this stability is achieved, I yank
the ground like a carpet from under the viewer’s feet.
I use the simplified and codified languages of landscape painting
and mapping as means to examine context and world-view in general.
The bewildering multiplicity of the natural world has provoked an
equally bewildering multiplicity of explanations and systems (scientific,
pictorial, religious, psychological, etc.), which purport to represent
the world. I collide these representational systems and codes together
in attempts to reveal their limitations, preconceptions, and hidden
content. I return again and again to landscape imagery because its
unassuming quietness and apparent lack of content is a kind of transparency
through which structural differences and subtle systemic shifts
can be more clearly apprehended.
During 2004-2005 I lived in southern New Mexico; as a result, many
of my recent paintings are about conflicts between the fantasy and
the reality of “landscape” in the American West. I continue
to harbor a romanticized image of the great open land – unspoiled,
un-owned and sublimely indifferent to human presence, but the reality
was that I could go almost nowhere in the American West without
trespassing, and that most of the land has gone through multiple
types of human use, forever altering its form. The layers of history,
exploitation and symbolism that accrue to places are as much a part
of their reality as their natural beauty. I make paintings that
try to include all of this conflicting information, by both celebrating
the natural world and acknowledging that it only truly exists in
fantasy.
I also continue to be intrigued by the ways that our visual perception
is heavily influenced by psychological and physiological factors.
Optical information is messy, imprecise and fraught with contradictions.
Often my paintings are attempts to look straight at this self-contradictory
visual experience and enjoy its indeterminacy, duplicity, and oddity.
Sometimes this consists of placing the viewer at the center of an
uncompromising perspective that bends the world to the curve of
vision, simultaneously creating stability and instability, calm
and unease, the sensation of flying and of falling. In my work,
the earth and sky are often folded in on themselves, bent, split,
doubled, shifted, slipped and broken while retaining a basic and
crucial unity. I strive to make paintings that embody these dualities
and contradictions.
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