2010

Nonpasts Exhibition Statement

Denoting both present and future tenses, the term “present” in grammar is sometimes called “nonpast.” As a negation of past, evoking the spaces in between tenses, “nonpast” also recalls ideas of interstitial space such as Robert Smithson’s ideas of non-sites and Rosalind Kraus’s logical expansion of the intermediary forms and spaces separating landscape, sculpture and architecture. In various depictions of architectural ruins (as near as Brooklyn and as far as the former Soviet Bloc country Georgia), “nonpasts” refers to a rich ambiguity of states, tenses and forms. While some architectures appear in a state of natural decomposition and abandonment of use, others suggest decaying incompletion or human-directed disassembly. In these temporal grey areas the dialectics of interior-exterior, complete-incomplete, new-old, value-valueless, and use-neglect dissolve and blur.

Reconsidering the role of photography as sources for paintings, I have hung paintings in clusters and arrangements that call attention to the presence of the grid, activating the edges of the paintings with the space around them. The paintings become modules with which to play—slotting them together, pulling them apart, imaging them as interlocking tongue and groove joints in wood working or hovering fragments of an incomplete modular system. Inside each painting is also another grid: the viewfinder’s residue—the indexical mark of photography. Photography becomes the obsessive segmenting of the world; in painting these views distilled and reduced into their essential forms he creates imperfect recollections of the mind.

The exhibition “Nonpasts” also marks my exploration in sculpture. Creating over a dozen concrete boxes and indexical casts, these sculptures call to mind funerary monuments, architectural columns, pedestals or coffins. In their serial forms and material sameness, I allude to the minimalism of Donald Judd, So LeWitt and Carl Andre, yet in their rough-hewn materials and character I acknowledge incompleteness and disorder.

2006-08

“The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

My work explores landscape as a memorial. As a painting, a landscape is a physical fact and work of the mind. In viewing a landscape, an internal ethos is projected onto a perception of external environment. My most recent work documents Brooklyn's industrial past and future residential growth, depicting specific sites of building and decay in the present Williamsburg and Redhook waterfront. As American manufacturing has moved overseas, these unused warehouse buildings and structures—icons of the industrial revolution— have been transformed/reclaimed by luxury. Inspired by construction materials, I use metallic pigments, often as skies, which evoke the presence of pollutants in the atmosphere.