drawing/painting projects statements cv contact
Over the past few years my research has primarily focused on how photographic images dominate our understanding of the world. They shape our collective unconscious, regulate our desires and can limit our potential. Making use of a variety of sources such as reality TV, photographic weblogs and state digital archives, my project has explored the relationship between the technological tradition of photography and the precarious process of drawing. My work is a collage of historical strategies of mark-making and theoretical approaches to drawing. A graphite line traced from a digital image is set side by side to, or overtop of, a messy abstract paint drip. The resulting relationship of layering and effacement speaks to the process of enculturation we seldom consent to. My drawings are simultaneously invested with subjective energy and emptied of it. The abstract gesture, rather than being an investigation into freedom is mediated and kept in line by the defined structure of the found image. Likewise, the repetition of the found image is confused, covered and sometimes obliterated completely by the mess of different medias. By retracing some of the sites in which the self is understood in relationship to others, my project hopes to draw attention to the process of cultural hegemony and create a new psychological space in which to understand and disrupt it.Exhibition Statements: In a collage of historical drawing styles, I produced a series of drawings called Palms in response to conflicts in the Middle East. They are tracings of date palm trees that I appropriated from the background of war reporting in Iraq and Gaza. In a contour line style, the leaves of the palms resemble shrapnel, the branches and fruit mimic explosions and the edges of the trees disintegrate into space. The palm tree has often been used as an emblem attached to a narrative in western art that evokes and contains otherness. Especially the date palm. In my drawings, the palm tree breaks down almost entirely, disrupting this narrative and questiong the idea of self and other. When considered in the context of these wars the white smears of the oil paint parallel the blankets of white phospherous as the appropriated palm simultaneously implodes and explodes questioning another mislead project of mastery over otherness. 3 Living and 3 dead takes as a starting point a medieval poem in which 3 young kings come across 3 corpses in various stages of decay who scold the kings for their worldy preoccupations and remind them of their eventual demise. The composition of the drawing is derived from a detail of floral wall paper I sampled from the background of pornography. Petals and leaves simultaneous fall upwards and downwards and their relationship to the viewer becomes a meditation on desire, intimacy and pleasure. Thanksgiving, 2006 (Anaconda Camp) is my response to a cake making contest that occurred at the largest military base in Iraq a few years ago. The decadence of the cake is seen in contrast to the lurid soldier eating a corn dog evoking a contemporary scene of an absurdist military feast. Excerpts From Drawing the Disaster: “Drawing is always in a state of becoming; it can show a line of thinking as well as show thinking itself.” “…as soon as I felt that I had a grasp of the aesthetic strategy, the aesthetic exhausted itself and the original intention that had brought it into being, diminished. I had reached its aesthetic limit. In which case, it became necessary to begin again with a different approach, re-working what I had already drawn. In this way, my drawings became one failed attempt after another. Failed attempts to properly come to terms with the subject matter that I was dealing with. I began to think of failure, not as something negative, but rather as a position of mobility – as a possible strategy for dealing with these images that we have no use for.” “They must not be understood as expressions of self, or as a searching for the wholeness of self, or, of course, as therapeutic explorations of self. I have tried to explore the problematic from which we understand the self, and discuss some of the regulatory powers that keep this understanding in check.”
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