Para•dox (2019-present)
In recent works, I deconstruct a selection of text rooted in my experience as a woman in America, carefully altering and repeating each phrase to create ambiguity. These works begin by my drawing text; if drawing is defined as mark-making, then writing is drawing, and I approach the page in terms of proportional concerns rather than ideas of hand-writing, studying each letterform as line, shape, form. I then layer this text again and again in paintings, switching between modes of hand-created stencils and the mark of the hand directly on the surface.
Within these attempts to examine text as image, my layers establish pictorial depth and a visual depiction which denies the idea of structured verbal meaning, but this subsequently – inevitably – brings about emotion through the combination of visual cues. This reveals the paradox of the uniquely complicated text and image relationship: in order to establish the separation from (or nonexistence of) a word’s meaning, one inevitably first states what its existence/meaning is. What results in each work is a mindscape which simultaneously caters to, negates, and reveals one’s emotional and meaningful context of the text. It is not concrete poetry, it is not ekphrasis, and it is not solely a painting, rather the work oscillates between and among all of these at once, leaving the viewers to grapple with their relationship to the power of words.
In recent works, I deconstruct a selection of text rooted in my experience as a woman in America, carefully altering and repeating each phrase to create ambiguity. These works begin by my drawing text; if drawing is defined as mark-making, then writing is drawing, and I approach the page in terms of proportional concerns rather than ideas of hand-writing, studying each letterform as line, shape, form. I then layer this text again and again in paintings, switching between modes of hand-created stencils and the mark of the hand directly on the surface.
Within these attempts to examine text as image, my layers establish pictorial depth and a visual depiction which denies the idea of structured verbal meaning, but this subsequently – inevitably – brings about emotion through the combination of visual cues. This reveals the paradox of the uniquely complicated text and image relationship: in order to establish the separation from (or nonexistence of) a word’s meaning, one inevitably first states what its existence/meaning is. What results in each work is a mindscape which simultaneously caters to, negates, and reveals one’s emotional and meaningful context of the text. It is not concrete poetry, it is not ekphrasis, and it is not solely a painting, rather the work oscillates between and among all of these at once, leaving the viewers to grapple with their relationship to the power of words.
