Para•dox (2019-present)
These works begin by my drawing text which is rooted in my experience as a bisexual woman in America; 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 letter 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 which then 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.
These works begin by my drawing text which is rooted in my experience as a bisexual woman in America; 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 letter 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 which then 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.
