waking/sleeping
What lies beneath the surface? The unrest and eternal search for more than simply waking and sleeping, shifting and moving causes us to attribute meaning to even the simplest of things. We walk as crude and fragile beings in layered landscapes. The path of experiencing this world is rarely linear; rather, we meander and weave through experience and emotion in a way that is convoluted and complex. Joy and melancholy are not always far away from each other and neither are faith and cynicism. We wrestle with tasting and seeing the honey amongst the mud, soot, and duff; looking for transcendence through our fleshy and fogged eyes and ears.
Paint, plaster, and charcoal cover surfaces; marks and colors build into texture. Scratching on found plywood with broken scissors; mixing with sticks and broken brushes on enamel trays. Putting marks down, covering them up, agitating surfaces: build, dismantle, rebuild, dismantle again. Work surfaces are on the floor, the walls, hanging from something else, another painting or sculpture, wherever. I’m not a purist. Whatever material seems suited for each work and process- nothing is off limits. Layers of the natural world: growth and decomposition and forest floor. Layers of the city: walls, buildings, peeling of paint and graffiti, torn paper posters on streetlight poles. The studio is a mess of drips and spills of plaster and paint, burlap frayed. The body is involved in the making, plaster falls from hands, drips on jeans. Golden beeswax spills on the floor. Scratching, scraping, excavating. What lies beneath the surface?