Permutations
This work, which includes painting and collage, uses perception, recollection and permutation of space to create dialogues about identity and self-exploration.
I draw from my archive of photographs, which document a span of 20 years, a farm belonging to my grandparents where I spent a great portion of my childhood. This archive of private experience, in metaphor and symbol, is completely devoid of human presence. Using techniques of fragmentation, interweaving and recontextualizing, the works are open-ended evoking a sense of familiar yet objects become icons opening up existential themes.
The large, mostly black and white, paintings are on paper, canvas or linen and consist of graphite, charcoal, pastel, acrylic, spray and shredded photographs. Shredding my archive of photographs is a symbolic act of leaving the past behind and reapplication of the shreds establishes a new psychological landscape. The physical photograph shreds also act as a painting material to dissolve the pictorial and create new mark making, light and texture. The large scale implies a way to enter the space.
The photo collages invoke familial relationships by using photos of the actual quilts made by my grandmother and weaving them through the farm imagery. The quilt patterns permeate my childhood memories. I overlay images by printing them several times and by cutting them out of multiple prints and gluing them together.
“Signifier” is the first and only completed painting in this ongoing project. Acrylic and oil on linen is cut out and glued onto another piece of linen with imagery made with oil, charcoal and pastel.
This project is an excavation, a self-exploration, a search of my identity; it invokes familial relationships and a fascination of imagery that is ineradicable in memory, taking on iconic proportions.