October 04th, 2015

Most people try to turn this image ninety degrees counter clockwise so that the large gray mass on the left becomes the bottom. I can certainly respect this impulse because the visual weight of the area seems to demand it. I enjoy the initial sense of disorientation giving way to the countering stability of the lattice structure, suggested horizon, and inward-collapsing diagonals. The spotted textures move their way from foreground to middle ground; dark gray over light gray, white over gray, and white over dark gray. Their relation to one another  transforms  yet their identity is consistent, appearing as a  continuous constellation that suggests a ground plane.  I use corner to edge and corner to corner connections for the purpose of creating instances of spatial equivocation. Shape relationships, such as the double horizontal black lines and small triangles within the triangular space just below and left of the composition center, register as both  a continuation of the background and as suspended shapes in the foreground. The photographic, as expectation of natural space, is undermined by shape relationships that privilege alignment  over spatial position. This disruption, a Modernist convention, is unsettling because it calls into question the simple acceptance of a thing or event seen, rendering it suspended in a moment of becoming.


I begin making these images with processes in mind that I know, from practice and experience, are likely to arrive at compelling thoughts and new relationships. I do not  start with a finished product, statement, or narrative that I am trying to illustrate and yet, in spite of myself, I cannot seem to let them be. At some point after they are completed I automatically begin to ascribe some kind of meaning or narrative to them. The overall sense I have when looking at this image is that there is a strangely unsettled mass resting peacefully in a kind of mathematical, cerebral hanger, like a thought coming into being, preparing to take flight.