Artist Statement 2011
My recent drawings and paintings are site conditioned and evidence of a distillation of contextual observations through a lens of architectural ideas. By studying architecture, I learned to plan from beginning to end with certainty; I want to describe the means that will give me an absolute end. And yet as an artist, I trust my intuition and believe that variability during aesthetic process holds incredible value. My interest in both fields has manifested a personal navigation, or dialogue between similar yet dissimilar aesthetic trajectories. By oscillating between art and architecture and allowing them to influence one another, my design approach has become rhythmic with calculated variations, while the object serves as documentation of process.
Architects organize via geometry, thus making space comprehensible. Through site analysis, a system of architectural arrangement is derived and intended to rest on a site with purpose and clarity. Similarly, a canvas can be considered as analogous to a site in that it has specific geometry and boundaries containing compositional elements. Donald Judd states, “…the edges of the rectangle [canvas, painting…] are a boundary, the end of the picture. The composition must react to the edges and the rectangle must be unified…”. Resolving, or unifying an aesthetic composition requires an intimate reading of the site and its surroundings; context is determined via phenomenological observation of place and its inherent qualities. How does light enter the space? What type of sound, noise or distraction is heard? Is the space empty, or are others nearby? These contextual variables are decisive in regards to a completed work that communicates intent.
Architects communicate and refine their ideas through section, a graphic means to representing formal and spatial relationships. Comparably, artists are also concerned with the internal and spatial logic of their compositions. Donald Judd strengthens this argument by stating, “Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors on the same surface almost always lie on different depths. An even color, especially in oil paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always both flat and infinitely spatial.” In regards to my recent work, section has been crucial as it has assisted me to articulate a spatial and material arrangement that is evident of contextual observation. This economy of design, or minimal approach is similar to the manner in which an architect might choose materials (steel, concrete or glass perhaps…) to achieve aesthetic clarity.
Through process, I observe and respond to environmental context through spatial and material organization. Amidst this event are issues to be explored, including but not limited to time, noise, dialogue, reflection, silence, and fatigue. These aesthetic observations are in effect, subjective recordings, or appropriations of surroundings and inherent subtleties therein. Thus, my work encompasses compressed and framed iterations of experiential observations within the environment. They are aesthetic experiments that reflect rhythmic, sequential design moves while incorporating intuitive variability, yielding dialectic end results that synthesize and direct me towards the next truth or experiment.
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