| Presidential Suites, 2005 | |
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Untitled (Reagan) oil on panel |
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Untitled (Nixon) oil on panel 12x18 inches 2005 |
| Spill paintings, 2003–2004 | |
The paintings themselves are difficult to describe (and photograph) because they are based on an optical effect that requires close inspection of the work, and the images hidden within the work can only be seen at an oblique angle. Below, I have sometimes provided a full disclosure of the hidden image. When seen face-on from a distance the paintings look like pools/drips/splotches of black enamel on glass, with a mirror backdrop (reflecting the surrounding architecture and the viewer). Upon closer inspection the viewer might detect images hidden behind these splotches; these images are painted on the other side of the glass, behind the black enamel, and these images are reflected in a mirror that is placed about 3/4 inch behind the glass. The purpose of this optical contrivance/device is to foster the experience of voyeurism in the viewer. While most paintings are to be experienced as a seamless opticality, these glass and mirror paintings are meant to make one reflect on the act of looking through an absolute disjointedness in the act of viewing. A strange combination of private/public viewing results. All of the paintings incorporate bawdy, often child-like or dream-like imagery. Scattered across the picture plane the images are meant to allude to a visual game of association (the psychoanalytic displacement and condensation of language and image). The works display an alternative to perspectival painting practices--the works are at once figurative and abstract (inspired by Pollock's drips; Duchamp's latent subject matter)--and deal with what Jacques Lacan called the "anamorphic" tradition (e.g. Holbein's anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors can only be seen at an oblique angle). In their hidden dimension, the paintings reference the landscape tradition: in the use of mostly a horizontal format, in the shifting depths of field between actual and fictive, pictorial space, and in my use of pastoral imagery. |
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Installation shot of |
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Wound Enamel on glass; mirror 24 x 36 inches 2003 |
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Wound (detail) |
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Wound (verso; without mirror) |
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Down the hole Enamel on glass; mirror 36 x 48 inches 2003 |
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Down the hole (detail) |
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Fridge Enamel on glass; mirror 5.5 x 4 feet 2004 |
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Fridge (detail) |
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Fridge (verso; without mirror) |
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Treehouse(detail of verso; without mirror) |
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Swans (view of verso without mirror and frame) |
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Snowman (verso; without mirror) Enamel on glass 20 x 30 inches 2004 |
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Monkey-money (verso; without mirror) Enamel on glass 20 x 30 inches 2004 |
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The Following... Hot foil stamping, acrylic paint and acylic medium on canvas, 10 x 6 feet, 2001 |
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The Following... (detail) |
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Fais dodo Hair embroidered on canvas 18 x 18 inces 1999 |
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Site of Manoeuvres (ratman) Hair embroidered on canvas; rabbit-skin glue 18 x 24 inches 2001 |
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Lube, Shocks, & Exhaust While You Wait |
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Hot Water, Heat, & Cable On All Fours Enamel on aluminum 24 x 48 inches 1998 |
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Empty Returns Enamel on aluminum 24 x 48 inches 1998 |
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Work Screenprinting on canvas 24 x 66 inches 1998 |
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Freude Screenprinting on canvas 24 x 66 inches 1998 |
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Log |
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2000 Screenprinting on canvas 24 x 66 inches 1998 |
| Centrefold Series 2001-2002 | |
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Canyon |
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Scubadivers photo reproduction; resin; paint; plasticine 10 x 22 inches 2001 |
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Suburb photo reproduction; resin; paint; plasticine 10 x 22 inches 2002 |
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Sheep photo reproduction; resin; paint; plasticine 10 x 22 inches 2001 |
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Pyramid oil on canvas |
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Eagle Screenprint and encaustic on canvas |
| From the Holidays Series |
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"[I]f we turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will be struck by its profound fictiveness. What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being award of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition...shows that the linkage between them is imagined. This imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources. The first is simply calendrical coincidence. The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection--the steady onward clocking of homogeneous empty time...The second source of imagined linkage lies in the relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market... In a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity...the newspaper is merely an extreme form of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day best-sellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing--curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables--nonetheless, for just this reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption ('imagining') of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that... The significance of this mass ceremony--Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers--is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull... What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life....[F]iction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations." (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , London/NY: Verso, 1983 (2002), pp. 33-35) |
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| From Valentine's Day | |
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Condoleeza encaustic on newspaper |
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Prisoner encaustic on newspaper |
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Wedding encaustic on newspaper |
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Musician (obituary)
encaustic on newspaper |
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Real Estate encaustic on newspaper |
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Fat man encaustic on newspaper |
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Roses encaustic on newspaper |
| Oil paint on ceramic plate | |
| This is an allegory of painting. The work springs from a reflection on the commodity as fetish, and how this comes out of capitalist production models. In the case of Repast, I have taken plates that are mass produced and turned them into craft objects; they reference at once famous works of art and the folk tradition of painting on plates. Much of my work comes out of this Western obsession with producing systems, in art in the form of collections of an aesthetic or epistemological order, so as to advance the notions of a common good, a common taste, a common knowledge, based on Enlightenment principles. The overlapping of many registers reflects a need to make sense of the hidden power structures at work in all forms of representation. Repast is characterized by a deterritorializtion of the sources at hand: advertising hangs next a detail of a Van Eyck, a Disney/MacDonald's plate sits next to a Rembrandt. The desire to create a new language not of communication and meaning so much as a way to think new paths of becoming, new opportunities to assimilate images and words and orders of things , might foster a new outlook on the nature of Western colonial thinking. In Repast, I establish a link between the development of monocultures in terms of animal-raising, and the treatment of humans as cattle (their labour and flesh used as commodities). Repast deals directly with the idea of collections coming out of a privileged subject position, that of the formation of the bourgeois subject. I am interested in still life as a low genre within art, one that served to reflect the status of an emerging subjectivity in 17 th and 18th century Northern Europe. The lack of human presence within still life was supposed to make one reflect on the perishability of the objects present, and ultimately on death. Objects in fact were filling in for human presence and human relations. This is the rationale of the commodity as fetish. Its status stands in for the person's identity: I am what I own, what I display conspicuously. The collection was painted on a variety of plates acquired from thrift shops, and the one binding subject within the collection is the depiction of 'flesh'. The work was also inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked . In this book he tells us that the two things that distinguish humans from animals is our ritual treatment of food, and our use of language. All humans, whether "civilized" or "primitive," prepare their food through cooking or preserving it from rot. Then there is the added supplement of how one cooked or prepared the food, that signifier of class and prestige that is conferred onto the consumer. | |
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