shift lens 2015

Artist Statement

Neurologists have determined that the old brain holds the seat of our most primal understandings of the world. Goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsive behaviors generate from this lower cerebral core.

My sculpture and drawings inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. Systemic and non-representational, the work is subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. I find beauty and disturbance through shifts in tool, layering and material to create passages of tone, density, speed, path and frequency within a system. The work references physiological systems – such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium – and psychological states.

I’ve come to understand my work as a kind of self-portraiture. Within the quite reserve and formal abstraction is a strong impulse to speak from a deep place within myself about what is private, vulnerable, fragile, and perceptive to the human condition. My work is a mirror of how I experience the world, as I negotiate physicality, optics and ideas through my drawing languages, my voice withholds, blurs, teases and veils.

shift lens is a response to the front third floor of the Mattress Factory’s 1414 Monterey gallery. It was likely originally used as a bedroom, with two sash windows, woodwork and painted wooden floor. I was particularly taken with how the windows are like a lens, as though you are on the inside of a camera. I decided to stretch taut thread in vertical and horizontal directions within the architecture – in cool and warm tones – in front of the windows to filter the natural light, to alter you vision and create a floating volume of color. The work measures twenty feet wide by eight feet high by five feet deep, and is made with Egyptian cotton and staples.

I made the work in scale to your body, with it’s bottom edge near your knees and it’s top at the reach of your hand as it reaches overhead. This is the zone of your body’s primal and physiological understanding of space.

I frequently return to subtle distinctions between drawing as noun and verb, as it is a long held focus in my studio practice. This blurred distinction drives my fascination with and expanded definition of drawing languages and the resurgence of drawing in contemporary art. My collective body of work is an iteration of this language.