2012

“You are Nature” examines the perceived distinctions of nature and culture that I dissolve in painting. While we might look stereotypically at the forms of nature as amorphous and with “organic” curves rather than geometric or rhomboid (as Robert Smithson discusses in Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy), I establish that there is no difference. The exhibition's title also recalls Jackson Pollock’s famous statement in response to when Hans Hoffman challenged Pollock’s drip paintings, telling him that he needed to be working from life or from nature and Pollock retorted, “I am nature.” I also have been affected by Peter Halley’s essay “Nature and Culture” in which he describes cultural events such as World War II as natural disaster like a flood or fire, calling attention to phenomenon as a web of signs that constitute the modern world.

Some of my works depict enigmatic objects in the landscape, while others frame the landscape through technology such as digital screens that, like paintings, mediate how we experience our world. My work broadly views the landscape impressionistically through the artificial environment of mechanical reproduction. In his work, the splatter is the dot is the screen. The mystery of craft in painting is explored, developing richly layered surfaces through drips, splatters and removal, suggesting various screens, veils or scrims of light through which images are viewed. The paintings on the wall depict segments of cast light shaped by windows that are detached from their original source and call attention to the architecture as a canvas and screen for painting.

While my previous exhibition “Nonpasts” focused on a conceptually ambiguous, site specificity in architectural cement boxes and cast slabs, “You are Nature” emphasizes painting the enigmatic in the landscape, in both land and water, above and below the surface. In a recent SCUBA diving trip with my brother, I explored the world under the surface of water as inspiration for painting and models for thinking about nature. If the 1960s were about space as a site for exploration and repository for imaginations, our final frontier is our environment. The ocean, with miles of uncharted territory and countless unexamined species and organisms, is our intergalactic fascination. Water becomes a unifying metaphor for my work in terms of the surface and depth of painting.

2011

My work depicts actions in the landscape that are not always obvious. These actions are manifested in material displacements of thing falling apart, people vacating structures and things displacing other things, dwellings being built, torn down and rebuilt. I paint these landscapes in a way that aestheticizes their atmospheric, material and formal conditions, I think painting is about making the everyday appear more beautiful.

Using painting to communicate these issues is just as complex as the issues themselves. Photography, which I use as source material for the paintings, is culturally accessible and has a relatively short history as opposed to painting, which is known for being a commodity, a luxury object. While it’s impossible to escape the reification of this object, I believe painting can express a beauty that is intelligent, well-informed and conscientious of its contradictions.

If I am romanticizing these landscapes of architectural decay, I am doing so in order to seduce the viewer, to engage him or her in a more complex context about the landscape’s political, economic and conceptual content. Often, these complexities have to do with gentrification, globalization, deindustrialization and urban blight. The forces at work are often in dialectical oppositions that become blurred, such as preservation-development, interior-exterior, complete-incomplete, new-old, value-valueless, and use-neglect.

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, Sol 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.