ARTIST STATEMENT

Somehow I feel more conservative than I used to because my works are no longer impossible. I’ve been building things. I’ve been interested in craft and color, the subject of perception in drawing and painting and the shapelessness of musical figures. But maybe on the other end of this insecurity is an awareness that the multiple sites of a project don’t necessarily have to be congruent. They can each be dealt with on their own terms, and their terms continually shift: there’s the direct experience of a work, its elastic representation, and the conversations that attempt to access the experience when its fact is at a distance from the senses.

For a few years I was utterly confused about how my work fit within a gallery setting. It’s not that my works were too ephemeral, large or rejected rarefication necessarily; it’s that I hadn’t been viewing the setting as a multitude of relationships to operate within and in-between. My recent work though has for the most part been built from this dynamic, responding to the contextual parameters of both physical as well as conceptual sites.

I often spend a fair amount of time planning and discussing with the curator of a show how the choreography and pacing of attention interacts with meaning, and then develop my work based on the overall exhibition context. My process has been twofold: approaching a project as multiple sites while continuing to research and experiment with the ways in which space itself formats the social.

Most of my recent work has involved sculptural elements that have a basis in the semantics of architecture: windows, walls, ceilings, doors, stairs, floors, etc.  Like these architectural building blocks, it’s primarily through the body that meaning is activated. A window is something to look out of or into; to be looked at through. Railings demarcate territory and can be leaned on. Walls partition and hold the space in-between material, regardless of if they are made from vocal bodies, thread or wood. A door creates and blocks passage from one condition to another. The floor is an inevitable point of bodily contact, its performance is relentless.

With all of these elements an institutionalized body becomes a ready-made. And while the body, an institution in itself, may reinforce predictable patterns of learned behavior, my aim is to create works which not only reflect upon these constructions but project possibilities.