My current work employs imagery from the animal world as a means of exploring ideas proposed in contemporary physics regarding the existence of multiple dimensions, or a “multiverse”. I use imagery of dens, nests, and burrows, and various endangered species to explore ideas around endings, loss, and the speculative potential of parallel worlds. The work plays with traditional distinctions between abstract and representational imagery, and historic conventions of landscape painting.
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I paint images of animal constructions as a means to negotiate ideas around endings, and the speculative potential of parallel worlds. What happens to phenomenon and matter when they are no longer exist in discernible spatial/temporal dimensions; where is the boundary between existence and non-existence; and, what about transmutation? In response to these questions, I began to entertain the possibility that endings are not a terminus. Thus, these structures could be seen as portals, like Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole, to another world, a different state of consciousness.
The natural forms suggest an interest in landscape painting, but reject the genre’s historic concern with sweeping vistas and deep space, focusing rather on intimate portraits of often-overlooked animal activity, pointing to my interest in that which is
unseen, but ubiquitous. The images are derived from online sources and my own photographs, reflecting the breakdown of barriers between virtual and empirical experience. The compositional framing is “found”; minimal cropping is required. While working on a piece, visual information is reduced or omitted, as the process of painting adds layers of meaning, altering and augmenting the image.
Painting, like science, has the potential to both illuminate and obfuscate simultaneously.
These pictures reside resolutely in that intersection.
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I paint images of animal constructions as a means to negotiate ideas around endings, and the speculative potential of parallel worlds. What happens to phenomenon and matter when they are no longer exist in discernible spatial/temporal dimensions; where is the boundary between existence and non-existence; and, what about transmutation? In response to these questions, I began to entertain the possibility that endings are not a terminus. Thus, these structures could be seen as portals, like Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole, to another world, a different state of consciousness.
The natural forms suggest an interest in landscape painting, but reject the genre’s historic concern with sweeping vistas and deep space, focusing rather on intimate portraits of often-overlooked animal activity, pointing to my interest in that which is
unseen, but ubiquitous. The images are derived from online sources and my own photographs, reflecting the breakdown of barriers between virtual and empirical experience. The compositional framing is “found”; minimal cropping is required. While working on a piece, visual information is reduced or omitted, as the process of painting adds layers of meaning, altering and augmenting the image.
Painting, like science, has the potential to both illuminate and obfuscate simultaneously.
These pictures reside resolutely in that intersection.