arteles_catalogue_2014

LANDSCAPING THE LANDSCAPE
My dream is to live inside the collapsed, colorful world of a
painting. But since I exist in three-dimensions, my work is painting
masquerading as sculpture. While at Arteles I am creating
environments that pull painting into the physical world—giving
dimension to colorful contours and silhouettes. I am fascinated by
the discrepancy between our tangible spatial world and the illusory,
poetic nature of perception. I’ve read that some people who are born
blind but gain sight later in life find it impossible to reconcile visual
shapes and colors with the sensory understanding of space they
developed before sight. Shadows, for instance, appear to be dark
‘objects’ presumed to contain the same mass as the forms that have
cast them. Likewise, the illusion of objects shrinking in perspective
is a perplexing optical puzzle. With this in mind, I construct visual
experiences to explore the strange splendor of perception.
The installations I’ve been working on at Arteles incorporate
painting, sculpture, and performance to establish habitats where
spatial awareness is distorted. Working directly within the natural
world, I’ve been wrapping the landscape with long rolls of paper
I paint in advance, and then staging the other Arteles residents
within the painted environments. From a distance, my installations
may appear to be large canvases suspended in the landscape,
but upon closer inspection their three-dimensionality becomes
apparent. I like to think of this process as “landscaping the
landscape.” The process is sculptural, the approach painterly, the
product photographic and the experience immersive.