77
Echoing has become an important aspect of my work. I consider the home to be a container that not only shelters our physical bodies but also harbors our memories and daydreams. My work simultaneously embodies warmth and sterility to question the notion of absence and how a void emerges only to reveal the presence of something else. My work is an investigation of loss, where the exchange between searching and hiding is continually at play. I am attentive to my own sense of urgency to preserve memory while simultaneously being aware of the impossibility of such an endeavor. Although my work suggests vacancy (visually and metaphorically), art making provides me the opportunity to reimagine the void through an uncanny and sometimes painful confrontation with my own memories. The home is a place that recalls the past; the curve of a railing, the smell of carpet, or the color of light shining through a window perform as bookmarks in our memory. It is a location often cherished and loved by its inhabitants. It embodies the potency of nesting, birth, and safety. When the home experiences any form of adverse change, it has the potential to harbor tragedy. In such moments of augmentation, emotional contradictions occur, where
the uncanny emerges through the conflation of both ease and discomfort. Once a place of refuge, the domestic habitat can transform into a complex world layered with haunted memories, projected contrivances, and mundane iteration. Echoing has become an important aspect of my work, where characters, patterns, and gestures appear in several different iterations. I am interested in challenging the notion of the autonomous art object and am attempting to form relationships that exist within and beyond the borders of each work. One of my objectives is to question the exclusion of painting from the contemporary conversation of relational and interactive work that dismisses it as a non-transitive art form. The provocation of the frame’s edge is a way to investigate the painting as an object that speaks to and from its exterior. Another objective is to challenge the boundaries that differentiate between the realms of “painting” and “reality.” Gestures within the paintings are repeated in and on the architecture of the space itself. The frame of each work is no longer clearly identified as the termination of the narrative; rather, each painting functions as a possible character that exists within the same world as the viewer.