Now
The following presentation documents some recent thematic subjects and working approaches in my painting and drawing practices. Occasional views of the artworks in specific settings are interspersed throughout the presentation to emphasize the importance of scale, structural format, and the associations between numerous elements in the installation of my work. Individually, my paintings deploy an engaged painterly approach that foregrounds visuality just as it critically pursues a discourse with other media technologies. My subjects are invariably metaphorical, meshing personal experience with broader cultural matters.
Arboretum – NE | 2009 | installation view, oil on canvas diptych, each 92 x 69 cm
Late Spring | 2012 | installation view, oil on canvas diptych, each 183 x 137 cm
Arboretum (Catalpa Ovata + Catalpa Bungei) | installation view
Arboretum Birch | 2008 | oil on canvas, 92 x 122 cm
Rhodesia + Arboretum Yellow Pine | installation view, Birch Libralato
Rhodesia | 2008 | oil on canvas, 183 x 137 cm
Rhodesia + 3 Day Moon | installation view
4 Day and Twenty-Six Day Moons + Peking | installation view
Always Already
My artwork is frequently presented as a grouping of paintings that function as a thematic installation. As an installation, the viewer actively engages the artwork as a set of related components, a condition that encourages active interpretation.
The paintings comprising Always Already developed from a chance encounter with an 18th c. painting by Johann Melchior Roos while visiting Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. The monumental painting depicts an arresting scene of an incongruously diverse menagerie of animals, peacefully coexisting in an idyllic European landscape setting. Immediately apparent to me however was the implicit ideology of the era of Enlightenment, one that was based on the promise of progress through the pursuit of rationalist scientific knowledge. This same ideology espoused an assumption of human superiority, and accordingly, the dominion, and more optimistically stewardship, over all things. I was just as quickly struck by how utterly remote this conviction was from that of our current time of environmental despair. Always Already reframes this issue recognizing the shift in our worldview.
Always Already (okapi) | 2010 | oil on board, 41 x 56 cm
Always Already | installation view
Always Already (zebra) | 2010 | oil on board, 36 x 56 cm
Always Already (two rhinoceros) | 2010 | oil on board, 46 x 61 cm
Always Already (two rhinoceros) | 2010 | oil on board, 31 x 46 cm
Always Already (deer) | 2009 | oil on board, 31 x 41 cm
Always Already (swan) | 2009 | oil on board, 31 x 51 cm
Temagami (Wet Morning) | 2013 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 122 x 186 cm
Temagami (Windy Afternoon) | Work in progress | oil on convex Masonite structure, 122 x 186 cm
In progress studio view.
Temagami 1 | 2011 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 51 x 78 x 15 cm
Temagami 2 | 2011 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 51 x 76 x 15 cm
Temagami 5 | 2011 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 51 x 76 x 15 cm
Temagami 6 | 2011 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 51 x 76 x 15 cm
Temagami 4 | 2011 | oil on convex Masonite structure, 51 x 76 x 15 cm
Ellipse Moon | 2010 | oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cm
Pentimenti (Rhinoceros) | 2014 | oil on canvas, 46 x 66 cm
Pentimenti (Fox) | 2016 | oil on canvas, 46 x 66 cm
Pentimenti (Lion) | 2015 | oil on canvas, 46 x 66 cm
Gorilla | 2015 | gouache on crumpled paper, 38 x 30.5 cm
