PRESENCE | ABSENCE

August - December 2020,

Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, NY

INSTALLATION VIEWS:

EXHIBITION STATEMENT:

My work leverages the self-creative capacity of material—autopoiesis—to explore questions of release, embodiment, and landscape. Evoking forms shaped by gravitational forces, land formation, and bodily regeneration, I produce artworks that speak to the function and structure of the body and the external world, resulting in new visual forms with varying degrees of abstraction. Through a series of ink paintings and cyanotypes, a sculptural piece, and a video, my work takes on a stark contrast of darkness and luminosity, referencing both the visceral interiority and the perceptual intensity of massive landscapes. My materials interact through varying ratios of fluid, sediment, light, and object.

Following the procedure and recovery of my spinal fusion surgery I’ve grown to be intensely attentive to my body’s sensations: pain, muscle tension, mobility, and the general interactions that occur along muscular and skeletal chains. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since quantitatively informed my life and art practice. As a consequence, my interest not only emerges from my own distinct embodied condition, but from my fixation on expansive space, driven by my desire to link the interiority of my experience to the extensivity of the physical world my body inhabits.

VIDEO WALKTHROUGH:

SELECTED WORKS:

Static Depth of Bodily Construction, 2020

Steel, cyanotype, wire, machine screws

Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) organizes the complexity of our soft tissues into a stack of cross-sectional images. Toggling through these images acts as a sort of stop-motion animation that generates a 3-dimensional rendering of our internal composition. This sculptural piece evokes the medical aesthetics of the MRI—through the high contrast of value and complex coagulations of unidentified texture—and the suspended specimen—through the staggered, vertical suspension of the cyanotypes.

Scope X, 2020

Alcohol ink and monotype on Yupo paper

Scope X presents the visceral tissue of muscle, bone, and cartilage as an unseen interiority and an immense scope of worldly matter. The word “scope” holds a double meaning in the duality of figuration and expansive space: (1) grand perception, and (2) a colloquial term for an orthopedic surgical procedure wherein a portion of the body in inflated with fluid for a small camera—a micro scope—and surgical tools to be inserted into the body.

Repetitions Series, 2019-2020
Cyanotype, aluminum, wire, machine screws

The cyanotype process is fundamentally photography and printmaking—chemical exposure to UV light and transferring objects onto paper. The creative capacity of the chemicals, light, and objects on the paper surface allow this media to be treated painterly, as the Scope and Range series are. Evoking the aesthetics of medical imagery (MRI and X-ray) and using exercise equipment as the subject of the image transfer, this work is imbued with a context of medicalization and rehabilitation.

Scope VIII & IX, 2019-2020

Alcohol ink and monotype on Yupo paper

The Scope series presents the visceral tissue of muscle, bone, and cartilage as an unseen interiority and an immense scope of worldly matter. The word “scope” holds a double meaning in the duality of figuration and expansive space: (1) grand perception, and (2) a colloquial term for an orthopedic surgical procedure wherein a portion of the body in inflated with fluid for a small camera—a micro scope—and surgical tools to be inserted into the body.

Nook Gallery Space + all Floated-Frames on view, 2018-2020

Flesh Study III, 2019

Alcohol ink with monotype on PVC panel

Flesh Study II, 2018