Core Persona 2: Grant — Material Instability
Grant began through direct engagement with art historical images and reproductions, using gesture, citation, and stylistic imitation as a kind of constraint.
The work is built around a material condition where the paint doesn’t stay where it’s put. If photo-based painting often depends on a kind of controlled, emulsion-like relationship to the image, this pushes in the opposite direction, introducing instability as a way of testing what happens when that control breaks down. The assumption is that a certain kind of inefficiency (slippage, drift, misalignment) isn’t just a problem to solve, but something that can actually bring the image to life. Working with materials that refuse to hold position becomes a direct extension of that idea.
Early works started with more sentimental or familiar imagery, to see what would happen under those conditions. That approach was then extended to art history, and eventually turned back onto my own previous work. Across all of it, reproduction becomes less about accuracy and more about pressure; how an image holds together, or doesn’t, when it’s subjected to gravity, excess, and material drift.
Grant began through direct engagement with art historical images and reproductions, using gesture, citation, and stylistic imitation as a kind of constraint.
The work is built around a material condition where the paint doesn’t stay where it’s put. If photo-based painting often depends on a kind of controlled, emulsion-like relationship to the image, this pushes in the opposite direction, introducing instability as a way of testing what happens when that control breaks down. The assumption is that a certain kind of inefficiency (slippage, drift, misalignment) isn’t just a problem to solve, but something that can actually bring the image to life. Working with materials that refuse to hold position becomes a direct extension of that idea.
Early works started with more sentimental or familiar imagery, to see what would happen under those conditions. That approach was then extended to art history, and eventually turned back onto my own previous work. Across all of it, reproduction becomes less about accuracy and more about pressure; how an image holds together, or doesn’t, when it’s subjected to gravity, excess, and material drift.
