A selection from a sequence paintings completed since 2023. 

My paintings develop incrementally and unpredictably. Usually the parts dictate the refinement of the whole, rather than the other way around.

Many (not all) of my recent paintings land on an impression of defacement, occlusion, or incomplete concealment. I think of how a smeared window simultaneously calls attention to its own surface while aggravating our desire to see what's on the other side.

soft obstacle
2019

Solo exhibition created for the School 33 Project Space Gallery in 2019. Over a decade of moving between painting and installation work, I had consistently generated a voluminous amount of small, fragmentary works on paper; soft obstacle grew out of my wish to develop an exhibition that would center, and spin out of, this body of work. While I retained much of my familiar improvisational, site-responsive sculptural approach, the little drawings played an outsized role, like a population of trickster microbes determining the form and trajectory of the gallery's ecosystem.

This exhibition was the realization of another long-simmering desire as well, which was to create an installation that would change continuously over the course of the exhibition. Rather than presenting an arbitrarily "definitive" endpoint that would remain static for the two-month run of the show, I insisted on maintaining an active space of perceptual fermentation, conflict, and evolution. The most intense period of making happened in the eight days leading up to the exhibition's opening. Afterwards, I revisited the space every week— quietly taking in everything that was happening, making alterations that felt organic to the existing dynamics of the room.

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A few notes about how soft obstacle was made:

Materials
Per my usual methods, I set up to work in the gallery with no 'finished' objects and no definitive concept of how the installation would take shape. But I knew I wanted to key in on two strands of my studio practice: small works on paper (as mentioned above) most roughly four or five inches square, and cast objects. The latter was a very new experiment for me, where I was using discarded packing material and fabric as single-use molds for creating forms in pigmented plaster, with various foreign objects inserted into the plaster as it cured .

I also used salvaged lumber and drywall, either recycled from my previous installations or, in some cases, left behind by artists who had used the Project Space gallery before me.

Lighting
The gallery had no pre-installed track lighting, and I chose to use only the bulbs and fixtures available in gallery storage. This meant a menagerie of clamp lights, desk lamps, and LED tubes, all producing illumination of different temperature and intensity.

These lights were intentionally staged as conspicuous sculptural elements in direct correspondence with the things I brought from my studio; cords, plugs, clamps would be visible, and I would have to build structures as needed to control the placement and direction of illumination.

Process
I placed the lights before arranging any other materials. Then I began to populate the space with the drawings and plaster forms in response to the available light, augmenting the gallery architecture with platforms, half-walls, and other hastily-built protuberances. I looked for affinities and tensions between objects, playing with density versus sparseness, observing how different zones of the installation began to take on different characteristics, which suggested paths for refinement and subversion.

soft obstacle
2019

Solo exhibition created for the School 33 Project Space Gallery in 2019. Over a decade of moving between painting and installation work, I had consistently generated a a voluminous amount of small, fragmentary works on paper; soft obstacle grew out of my wish to develop an exhibition that would center, and spin out of, this body of work. While I retained much of my familiar improvisational, site-responsive sculptural approach, the little drawings played an outsized role, like a population of trickster microbes determining the form and trajectory of the gallery's ecosystem.

It was also the realization of another long-simmering desire, which was to create an installation that would change continuously over the course of the exhibition. Rather than presenting an arbitrarily "definitive" endpoint that would remain static for the two-month run of the show, I insisted on maintaining an active space of perceptual fermentation, conflict, and evolution. The most intense period of making happened in the eight days leading up to the exhibition's opening. Afterwards, I revisited the space every week, quietly taking in everything that was happening, and making adjustments that seemed organic to the dynamics of the room.

.

.

.
A few notes about how soft obstacle was made:

Materials
Per my usual methods, I set up to work in the gallery with no 'finished' objects and no definitive concept of how the installation would take shape. But I knew I wanted to key in on two strands of my studio practice: small works on paper (as mentioned above) most roughly four or five inches square, and cast objects. The latter was a very new experiment for me, where I was using discarded packing material and fabric as single-use molds for creating forms in pigmented plaster, with various foreign objects inserted into the plaster as it cured .

I also used salvaged lumber and drywall, either recycled from my previous installations or, in some cases, left behind by artists who had used the Project Space gallery before me.

Lighting
The gallery had no pre-installed track lighting, and I chose to use only the bulbs and fixtures available in gallery storage. This meant a menagerie of clamp lights, desk lamps, and LED tubes, all producing illumination of different temperature and intensity.

These lights were intentionally staged as conspicuous sculptural elements in direct correspondence with the things I brought from my studio; cords, plugs, clamps would be visible, and I would have to build structures as needed to control the placement and direction of illumination.

Process
I placed the lights before arranging any other materials. Then I began to populate the space with the drawings and plaster forms in response to the available light, augmenting the gallery architecture with platforms, half-walls, and other hastily-built protuberances. I looked for affinities and tensions between objects, playing with density versus sparseness, observing how different zones of the installation began to take on different characteristics, which suggested paths for refinement and subversion.