My work focuses on the austere and colloquial. I seek to achieve a narrative weight of composition that describes what is unsaid but pronounced in body language. The title of my show refers to the role of furnishings in theater that dictate the placement of action on stage. This show focuses on the pregnant pause, the assertion of an absence, and the living spaces that we connect to these moments.
My practice is informed by isometric, structural drawing. The content is inspired by my everyday settings and actions — furniture that I make at my shop, crates that hold tools, ladders that I use, and chairs that I sit on. These furnishings grow to hold associations with the stresses that are had among them, be those stresses work related, or something more personal that is on my mind as I interact with their function. I sketch mainly from my head, and secondly from observation. In this regard I draw from Cambiaso, and my mentor, Pier Consagra. Utilizing photographic printed matter, I use collage to draw the viewer’s attention to the specificity of the surroundings in the painting.
The pregnant pause is a precipice of decision, and a striking intake of sensation. The figures exist on the threshold of immediate alteration to their life. In response, my pieces depict a moment of question, anticipation, and change to be had. In these moments, our environs take on a charged presence. As such, I treat the objects in my paintings as another figure. We associate the spaces we are in to the drastic moment of upheaval that occurs there.
This body of work illustrates the absence that we feel during upheavals in life; the empty chair, the vacant seat, the bare desk. Alongside, I am interested in the ways in which I circumvent that absence — sitting on the floor instead of the emotionally charged chair for example.
The role of significant objects in my life, and my attraction or avoidance of them, is reflected in this body of work. “Blocking” asserts the personal narrative that we attach to our surroundings.
