Deep Time / Solo Exhibition 2024

Grounded in the imagery of geologic time and the cyclical aspects of nature, I explore the complex relationships between presence, absence, loss and resilience through monumental painting installations, individual paintings, and collages.  We live at a time when landscapes and natural resources formed over millennia are treated as commodities in a capitalist race that is leading to ecological destruction and human violence on a massive scale. While loss is an unavoidable part of the human experience, our current corporate experience of grief is especially high as we face unprecedented challenges and tragedies on an almost daily basis. I view my practice as a spiritual antidote to the overwhelm, a means of looking for the NOW: the sacred emerging from a longer view.

The paintings imagery is derived from an extensive physical archive of images I have culled from printed matter, including Christie’s Auction House catalogs for Meteors and Fossils, the TIME Life “Library of Photography” books, and mid-century texts about geology.  Though printed within the last 100 years, these elegiac images often depict natural elements and environments that are already significantly altered or imperiled. 

Ghostly impermanence and physical embodiment are expressed through erasure, dissolution, or vigorous manipulation of my materials. I make my own paint using powdered pigments, dust and the particulate of geodes, natural flake mica, copper filings, powdered graphite and charcoal.  The installation “Obtaining Infinite Depth of Field” situates shaped paintings depicting crystalline x-rays, the chunky materiality of a meteor, nebula, and the fleeting moment of a total eclipse, layered on a painted wall mural of a wooded landscape. The shifting height of the mural and paintings, as well as strange shifts in scale, subtly alert the viewer to feelings of vastness and intimacy; an uncanny strangeness between human time and deep time.

I am motivated by creating an opportunity for each person be aware and sensitized to their own contemplation of an object, space, or time. To be present to oneself- with all the longing, hope, and fear that entails- is to gain insight and often empathy for self and others.  I view my practice as a commitment to be as radically present as each beautiful thing, both cosmic and earthen, bears up under the weight of the present and future-tense grief.