Switching Modes
Between 2006 and 2009, my practice organized around two complementary questions related to painting’s self-awareness. The first asked, what happens when painting reflects on its own conditions and internal framework? The other asked, how does a fixed structure get pushed into aliveness through material disruption? Two intertwined bodies of work developed in parallel.
The first was self-referential, staging the act of painting within depictions of studios and exhibition spaces. These works did not simply illustrate process; they turned the studio into a recursive space where making, viewing, and representation folded back into one another. Painting became both subject and method—an image thinking about its own conditions of production.
Rather than presenting these questions with a purely conceptual language, the work takes on a flattened, graphic, and comic-like quality. Influenced by narrative structures closer to literature than theory, the paintings operate as staged scenes, at times deadpan, at times tongue-in-cheek. Recursive logic unfolds through a deliberately accessible visual language.
Between 2006 and 2009, my practice organized around two complementary questions related to painting’s self-awareness. The first asked, what happens when painting reflects on its own conditions and internal framework? The other asked, how does a fixed structure get pushed into aliveness through material disruption? Two intertwined bodies of work developed in parallel.
The first was self-referential, staging the act of painting within depictions of studios and exhibition spaces. These works did not simply illustrate process; they turned the studio into a recursive space where making, viewing, and representation folded back into one another. Painting became both subject and method—an image thinking about its own conditions of production.
Rather than presenting these questions with a purely conceptual language, the work takes on a flattened, graphic, and comic-like quality. Influenced by narrative structures closer to literature than theory, the paintings operate as staged scenes, at times deadpan, at times tongue-in-cheek. Recursive logic unfolds through a deliberately accessible visual language.
The second, parallel investigation involved abstract material tests of structure and sensation. Treating painting as a dynamic system built through repetition, reinforcement, and interruption, I searched for the point at which incremental change ceased to be additive and instead produced a shift in state.
Rather than balancing order and disruption, the work sought a tipping point: where accumulated adjustments reconfigured the entire field. Over hundreds of variations, I repeatedly pushed surfaces toward that threshold, watching for the moment when something snapped from one condition into another.
Rather than balancing order and disruption, the work sought a tipping point: where accumulated adjustments reconfigured the entire field. Over hundreds of variations, I repeatedly pushed surfaces toward that threshold, watching for the moment when something snapped from one condition into another.
By the end of this period, the two modes no longer operated separately. The abstract investigations reappeared within the self-referential works, no longer as parallel experiments but as embedded structures. What had been oscillation became recursion, setting the stage for a more deliberate fragmentation in the years that followed.
A Fixed State of Irresolution 2010 acrylic on canvas 72" x 48" and 48" x 48"