ARTIST STATEMENT OCTOBER 20, 2024 —JANUARY 19, 2025
My work seeks to expand the possibilities for painting. I push against its immense history, using its essential components—color, surface, mark, image—to infiltrate other media and materials. The resulting hybrids continue to exist forcefully, even absurdly, in the universe, much like something out of French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros (1959).
I work with inflatable sculpture enabling painting to live and breathe, transforming it into a tattooed skin of sorts on a hybrid body. These sculptural paintings also serve as performance costumes, lumbering through the landscape on 12 sets of legs.I find the inflatable form compelling because it exists in two states: flaccid skin and taut volume, which become metaphors for our bodily processes: inhaling/exhaling, taut/wrinkled skin, and flaccid/erect organs.
I approach painting phenomenologically, focusing on embodiment rather than representation. The physicality and imperfections in each form disrupt perception because color and shape interact. The painted marks camouflage the form in ways that make the relationship more incongruous. Color complicates the shape by altering our
perceptual understanding of it. For me, color is connected to the body’s visceral physicality, because color is an animal instinct that grows out of our ancient, pre-historic genetic coding for survival. Bright colors create a deeply ingrained alert in the body, forcing us to pause and pay attention. So, I use that aggressive physicality as both warning and persuasion in my work.
Time-based elements like timers, GIF animations, video projections, and performances often activate my inflatable forms. As these forms age, they need to be washed, patched, and repainted as the color cracks from constant folding and movement. The ephemerality of the objects becomes another metaphor for the body’s aging process, its fragility and vulnerability, and its urgent demand to be seen.
Humor is a crucial point of accessibility in my work. I want it to be upfront and personal and I like to think of what I make as absurd painted self-portraiture. I use humor, empathy, and play as a foil for the monumental sculptural scale and expressive abstract painted and patterned surfaces. My work is also influenced by watching my three kids grow. They seem to
evolve in parallel: from bounce houses, soft toys, and cartoons to sci-fi, rock-climbing, dating, and dancing. Life and work keep pace with each other.
I am also interested in creating democratic access to my work, using a deliberately egalitarian collection of humorous, visceral, and empathetic connections. The audience is an active participant in my exhibitions and performances, pushing against the forms, touching their surfaces, laughing at their incongruity, and sometimes entering into or dancing within the forms. In short, they complete the work.
I believe painting responds to the zeitgeist. Some examples of this in my work happen when I look for moments where figurative body-scape (human, animal and alien) and landscape (land, sea and outer-space) meet. I want people to recall the sense of wonder of natural phenomena like mountains and clouds, or human inventions like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, sensing something that rides the line between a tonguein-cheek reference to Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1512) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
These inspirations intertwine with other curiosities: the aurora borealis, Star Trek, Lee Bontecou, Sam Gilliam, expandable foam, Niki de Saint Phalle, bioluminescent organisms, the Bee Gees, politics, Robert Rauschenberg, coral reefs, Elizabeth Murray, animal camouflage, Jessica Stockholder, cake frosting, SpongeBob Squarepants, feminism, Howardena Pindell, lumpy bodies, tattoos, Oscar Oiwa, rock formations, Dr. Who, jellyfish, peeps candy, laser tag, San Kim, fluorescent yellow, UFO sightings, abortion rights, neon pink, Olga Diego, spinnaker sails, graffiti, Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, hot air balloons, Karina Smigla Bobinski, bubblegum, Ant Farm, and more.
Finally, I deliberately expand the physical materials of painting, using PVC-coated canvas tarpaulin, Tyvek, spray paint, and Ripstop nylon, which are cheaper than traditional fine art materials. When you work at the scale I do, you really have to take cost into consideration. On another level, I use readily available materials because I want the philosophical underpinnings of my work (democratic access) to be embodied by the material itself. These choices reflect my desire to connect with multiple communities
and critique the elitist nature of some sections of the art world. At the same time, these materials offer a satisfying surface for creating ecstatically colorful, monumentally cartoonish, and uncanny sculptural paintings.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator, Sarasota Art Museum.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Judy and Fred Fiala
Charlotte and John Suhler
Gerald and Sondra Biller
Huisking Foundation
Audrey and Walter Stewart v.20240923