|
|
|
My paintings explore the psychology of the empty space. The home and interior's relationship to memory, fiction, narrative and ideas of scale including the miniature and childhood are examined to reveal a particular, yet abstracted, sense of loss and longing.
The works often serve as an attempt to visually recall a place once familiar, now an ambiguous convergence of fantasy and reality. The notion of the personalization of history and longing for an unknown time and place is explored through a combination of contemporary domestica and historical modes of the interior, such as a 19th Century Scottish rug pattern or an antique Florentine pharmacy.
|
|
|
|
There is consideration toward the concept of ruin and abandon, as well as a conscious denial of logical realism such as light sources or perspective. The decision to depict an environment that is based loosely in memory, but often overshadowed by idealization and dream, renders the space imaginatively and decidedly unreal -- a world that can only exist in paint.
|
|
|
There are never figures present in these rooms. As such, the paintings attach an uncanny figurative significance to inanimate objects, by suggesting -- through their very absence -- the presence of characters involved in an ambiguous narrative. Ideally, the viewer mentally inhabits and voyeuristically activates the quiet space by deducing, from visual elements in the painting, the memory of the action which may have taken place.
Because any tangible written story is left a mystery, the role of memory in the work is associated with reconstruction of language, and with imagination. Empty bookcases appear as symbols for the flexibility of a painting's narrative structure -- narrative being an aspect typically analyzed in the classical genre of interior painting.
|
|
Clockwise from top: The Rebels' Hideout, 2007, oil on board, 25"x20.5"; The Board Presents its Research, 2007, oil on board, 28"x19"; Untitled, 2007, oil, acrylic, ink on canvas, 65"x38.5"; Frame Story (view through peephole), 2006, acrylic and gouache on wood blocks; Paper Theatre (detail), 2007, tracing paper and pencil; Amagansett, 2006, oil, acrylic, ink on canvas, 60"x51"
|
|
There exists in these images a loneliness of inactivity, a void which represents the "thing" that was once there -- the idea of the story and its potential characters. The viewer engages this void in order to temporally re-create, albeit imagined, the essence of this original object as it might have once appeared in the artist's mind, or on her metaphorical page.
|
