Signal v Noise
Sometimes I feel compelled to explain myself. This is one of those times and what compels me is the unquestioned assumption by many who when confronted by an object that requires only quiet contemplation demand the object have a story behind it. This, then, is an attempt to describe what that story might be even though, under it all, there is no story.
The paintings are a reflection of the unfathomable, that for which there is no complete narrative, only brief and infrequent glimpses. And I don’t mean to be overblown; that’s simply what they are. They are also a mundane history: I made these marks with this color for six weeks last November; in the fall of last year I spent one week collecting the seed pods from clumps of tribulus terrestris (goathead or puncturevine).
My paintings and other objects I have created are unabashedly retinal. They do not possess a narrative as in ‘this painting is about…’ This lack of narrative, I naively think, is obvious in the works themselves. They are, actually, about no story, no narrative, a reflection rather of a state of being as no-thing gazing out at inexplicable phenomena. Most of the time creating a work is not done in the actual creation, but in this state, sitting on my front porch, for instance, looking. And if I can recapture a way of being in which I lose track of the names of that which I see, something truly miraculous can occur during which all there is and me are all subjects gazing at each other.
If you take away what you do and the stories you tell about who you are, if your history were erased, your family and everyone you know were to disappear, who is left? And what is it that that subject which is left is experiencing?
