* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
I’m interested in our age old desire to rise out of the everyday. Over and over, we strive for some sort of escape or transcendence while ultimately falling short. In painting we see this desire from antiquity to the present, continually visualizing some sort of alternative sense of place or being. My paintings toy with this desire to escape the finite. ‘Visions of Firsthand Knowledge” and ‘Blue Boxes” conflate weathered landscapes with geometric abstract painting. Both arenas are depicted as failing attempts to transcend finite space. ‘The Romance of Space and Time” and ‘Constellation Construction” are inspired from geometrically shaped borders created around constellations in the night sky. It is an artificially constructed flat plane set across the landscape of the infinite. This tension between flat and far mirrors the pieces’ trompe l’oeil technique where tattered constructions of carpentry create corrupted and decrepit places of escape. They dazzle and entertain while vanishing into unobtainable depths. The paintings make a point to acknowledge their shortcomings even as they uncontrollably fantasize with their spectacle of visual form. Their thirst for daydreaming battles their understanding of its limits.
