A Rip is a Misfortune, a Stain is a Vice

                       detail

Anonymous Text

Fiction

This statement should go on forever. It would then accurately demonstrate what I do. As a consequence of my approach I spend vast amounts of time pouring over everything, not wanting to overlook any opportunities for considerations. But inevitably I will. I begin by making paper; this paper I entrust to print, draw, and paint on as my first meditation. It is often made from my recycled clothing, which is blue. I only wear blue. It’s been eight years. Blue represents water in its clean and crisp, fluid and dynamic state. With blue I hope to seep uniformly into both photographic and experiential memory processes.

Thinking and working incrementally, I make frameworks such as grids, patterns, and sets of parameters to follow, which always take many months to finish. Within this lengthy period an anxiety builds. It cannot be resolved until I do something drastic to my seemingly finalized work. I treat my many months of labor with irreverence: a spray-painted black dot, a pierced “X”, an eyes-closed splash of paint. Hasty irresponsible decisions, it is as if, I’ve done my time, now I deserve to be impulsive. After such actions I work to rectify the situation by creating yet another framework that validates the disruption. I carry on this way endlessly.

The frameworks conceptually deal with: winter, communication, death, modernism, water, and love to name a few. I realize these categories are vague, but there is something about my visceral connection with them that I am trying hard to define. For example, the idea for and you want her, 2010 originated with the dissatisfaction that my work is constantly compared to Agnes Martin’s. It began with a highly magnified scan of a reproduction of River, 1964 by Martin, the scanned image mostly displayed the CMYK halftone dots, which I further manipulated so that only the outermost ring of each dot remained. The pattern was printed via inkjet onto hand made paper, on top of this I screen-printed transparent ink in a halftone dot matrix taken from an earlier piece of my own. Barely visible, this second layer was made in anticipation of the intaglio process that was to follow. I soaked the paper in water causing the inkjet layer to run everywhere except where it had been sealed by the transparent screen-printing ink. From there, a blue intaglio grid was printed on top balancing the random runniness of the inkjet. This step was a particular bit of joy for me because it allowed for an act of irresponsibility closely followed by an act of redemption. After drying, the print was then hole punched approximately five thousand times. The punched out holes were saved and re-glued back into place with no particular order. Upon this stratum I painted the bottom third of the print with tiny waves in horizontal lines corresponding to each other. The piece was then stitched to a pile of blue felt measuring one ½”, and an “X” was punched from corner to corner of the square format and through the entire paper felt stack. Diagonal bands of acrylic were then printed across the entire object. Still discontented, this time with the color green, which was created by the mixing of washed out inkjet pigment, I covered the top two thirds of the piece with white paint. On top of the white paint with blue ballpoint pen I reinstated the intaglio grid following the lines still visible on the bottom third, and placed a blue watercolor dot in each of the grid squares. On the bottom third I injected tiny white spots of gouache with a syringe. The piece froze at this point because it was due to arrive at a show the following week.

Agnes Martin once wrote, “It is so hard to slow down to the point where it is possible to explore one’s mind.” The approach I am entangled in shares the same conundrum, but there is no solution found within or conveyed through the work. In fact it is an attempt to slow down, yet it is punctuated with instinctual cravings that thrust it into compromised contexts, and the cycle continues. This is why nothing is ever finished; the sequence of time and thought, however fervently noted, never cease there are always more considerations. My composites labor toward completeness, but disturbingly conclude by confirming the complexity inherent to this search.

Lake Bottom Mooring

screenprint on a stack of lithographs hole-punched and sewn together with bookbinding thread
20" x 20" x .75"
2010

Microscript, Winter Exit

screenprint and ballpoint pen on paper hole-punched with holes re-glued into different spaces
23" x 23"
2010

and you want her

ink jet, intaglio, serigraphy, watercolor, collage, ballpoint pen, and acrylic on pierced paper and felt
23" x 23" x .5"
2010

Misspelled word

embossed paper, watercolor, colored pencil, and thread on Arches Text sewn to a stack of hand-made paper
23" x 23" x .5"
2010

Uniform Restraint

Screenprint and thread on lint
20" x 20"
2006

Family Photo

Watercolor-offset and acrylic
on paper
14" x 14" x 1.25"
2005

Learning German, Kugelschreiber

Ball point pen on paper
18" x 18"
2005

Having Only Ever Lived
With Women

screenprint, thread, and colored pencil on embossed paper
20" x 20" x .5"
2004

I am becoming aware that the subject of my work lies somewhere between my interests and the form the work takes. Perhaps the "real" subject is the time spent; the fact that I am able to some how carve out space from the pressures of survival, both animal and social, to work at being consciously healthy. The subject then becomes a form of psychology politics; how, with this time, am I making room for the kind of person I am? The answer is not only present in the space bookended by my interests and the form of the work, but it is also within the oscillation of those very interests -between phenomenological and stoic, as well as in the form of the work -between disorder and order.

I have only lately been attempting to activate this space as the studium of the work. In 2008 I attempted to act as a curator hanging two of my pieces in the corner of a gallery to invite in the space between a parenthetical dialogue. The following text was included:

Having only Ever Lived with Women, 2004 is a picture made within a body of work referred to as “Romantic Photographs”. During that time I thought of my process as "building photographs." Those pictures consisted of layers of paper, pigment, and emulsion. Unlike in commercial photographs, however, the paper substrate was handmade; the pigment might have included stains, threads, and artifacts; and the emulsion offered protection as well as exposure. I began by making the paper that I subsequently layered with various substances. Often, the paper took on dimensions of sculptural proportion, with its thickness measured in centimeters as opposed to millimeters. Frequently, too, the materials from which the paper was made had specific significance. For example, the paper included here was made from my bed sheets. Until this point in my life I had never lived with another man. How had the imagery of my life been altered? What did my capacity for memory playback contain/exclude because of this awareness? An image I can not shake, among others, is that of my mothers bruised and shaven thighs.

Soliloquy?, 2008 is a work composed of pieces: notes, remnants, collateral marks, and components constructed for future works that were for one reason or another left to drift. This piece is an attempt to collect and compose the debris in my life that can no longer go without enunciation; in a sense it is a coming to terms with the mess in which I currently find myself. It is the resurfacing of materials irreverent of the cogent structures meant to hold them back, like the scattered fragments floating above a once solid sailing vessel. It is the thoughts that although never said aloud now speak with the most potency.

In an ongoing effort I have been attempt to have catalogue reproductions of pieces appear in earlier unfinished states and then show the work in the gallery completed. Hereby activating a negotiation in which the viewer is made aware that he/she must maintain a memory of the work rather than relying on a catalogue image as a place to deposit thoughts. I have had two works enter into this negotiation with some limited success. The first, Misspelled Word, included in the 83rd Annual International Competition at the Print Center in Philadelphia, PA was chosen by Peter Nesbett and Shelly Bancroft from an image of the work in an earlier state, however after receiving the finished piece it was rephotographed and subsequently this image was included in the catalogue. The second, and you want her, included in Joy Divisions, Van Gallery, Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH was selected and reproduced unfinished, and then exhibited in its completed state.