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People tend to resist changing their set ideas about the world around them. In my work, I try to get people to reassess and challenge their pre-conceptions by playing with the common standards of time and scale. In my design work, I alter my audience’s sense of size by minimizing or enlarging various conventional proportions. Along with creating new shapes, I play with the viewer’s visual sense of time by limiting her ability to place my work in a specific period through the use of unexpected materials, embellishments and silhouettes that reference the past and future all at once. In my video work, I rewind, repeat, speed up or slow down, zoom-in tight, or catch an unexpected use of light to convey an alternate narrative. By offering a different way of seeing things, I challenge my audience to change their way of thinking and to engage in a questioning dialogue not simply about art or design but about all aspects of their lives and the world around them.
In new projects I have cited for this year, my goal is to refocus on my interest in inciting change though challenging preset conventions .I am excited to apply the benefits of design’s dialogue with the user to fine art’s emotional, visceral way of conveying ideas. Specific projects I hope to complete include works that will exaggerate the scale and shape of the human body to drastic degrees, suspend time through creativing installations the audience can walk around and experience for extended periods of time, and projects that play with ideas of place and time trough involvings traditional patterns and motifs executed in crafted in non-traditional materials and colors.
In perhaps the largest project I am looking to undertake, I am excited to apply my thesis to my own life. I am open to changing my physical environment and experiencing the effects on myself and my creative process. The supportive environment I hope to find in Spartanburg will provide what I need to meet these goals for perpetually challenging myself and others around me.
These 23 icon paintings reflect a completed series, executed from 2006-2007.
In 2005, I moved to Greece temporarily. I was immediately fascinated by the role the Greek Orthodox iconography plays in the lives of the Greeks. They are treated not as paintings, but as an actual presence. The people interact with them differently than one would with a work in a museum or a gallery; to them, the icons occupy the space that a live person would. They surrounded themselves with the icons in their homes and public spaces, as well as the religious spaces.
I observed this at a time in my life when I was increasingly frustrated with the direction of art and it’s inability to relate to the average person. I was seeking a more “useful” art, something that could create a presence, as opposed to a disconnected picture. However, I was also wary of simplifying or watering down my ideas, and my basis in conceptual art-making practices, just to satisfy a sometimes lazy audience.
In Santorini, I met an icon painter who briefly demonstrated his process. He explained that icon painting, though straightforward in its readability, is actually the first example of conceptual art, as it is not the person being depicted, but the idea of the person. It took centuries to refine the iconography so it reflected the exact mythology surrounding the saint, with only a few carefully considered signifiers. It became clear to me that icon painting was the consummation of everything I had been searching for in my own work.
Back in the States, I began appropriating the Greek Orthodox aesthetic to examine the relationships in my own life. I am a highly sentimental person and I tend to keep my friendships for very long periods of time, often defining myself in relationship to them. I began setting up photo shoots with my friends and family. Sometimes I would approach the person with an idea, and sometimes they would arrive with their own, but most of the time, the photo shoot became a synthesis of the way I viewed the person and they way they wanted to be viewed. The aim and the result is an almost Platonic view of the person—the way they exist timelessly, in my mind, as ideas. And the icons hold this power.
My paintings and mixed-media works on paper are lyrical responses to the disjuncture between the transcendent and the mundane. I use an open blend of figurative and abstract elements and (often) extreme asymmetrical balance, leaving large areas of the paper essentially empty, to create tense, fragile spaces that oscillate between transmuted image and inert material. This conflation of bliss and simplicity has at its core the impulse to glean joy and meaning from the commonplace and the desire to express the sadness of a spirituality disconnected from the ordinary.
The friction of this opposition also operates as a function of process. The grinding, routine labor of creation mirrors the transfiguration of dull material. More often than not, the work of an artist is monotonous, yet there is as much meaning in those gray hours as the moments of fleeting ecstasy. Labor grounds the work in reality.
I have recently begun to use images of bulls and flowers in my pictures. Beyond the obvious gender content (and overtones of sexual power) of this imagery, I am interested in it as a way to express the brute force of emotional vulnerability and as a way to convey the connection between mud and the sky. They are metaphors for labor and ecstasy.
In my work I seek to expose the poetry and drama of these apparent oppositions and the blanket wholeness that unites them.
Perhaps it was the shift into a new environment that inspired me to create a piece of art more tangible than simply a collection of poems to be read aloud. Suddenly surrounded by visual artists and their work, I embarked on the process of putting my words into a more visual format that I ever had before. Most of my first three-weeks here at Hub-Bub was spent hand-binding my first series of chapbooks, titled Myrmecology. These small books ultimately represent the completion of many months of researching, writing and revising a collection of poems rooted in the world of ants. And on the gallery walls, both as a part of a collaborative book-project with my fellow artists-in-residence and by themselves, you can find my poems. All of these pieces - the chapbooks, the pages from our collaborative book, The No-Friends Club, and my poetry based on the art of painter Egon Schiele - explore the space where visual art and literary art overlap.
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