ARTIST STATEMENT 2010

n this work which deals with the opened or contained spaces of zoos, corporate offices, shopping malls, and forests, I am dealing with an emotional content of absence, wandering, longing, hollowness, exile, and wilderness. I am interested in the space that contains these things. In most of the spaces, there are no bodies present, and if there are, they are bodies out of place in the space where they dwell.

I situate my work within a long tradition of painting and drawing which has always had a fundamental concern with the representation of space. I am looking for the precise point between figuration and abstraction where space is both described and abstracted at the same time. I am abstracting the representation of something concrete- a specific place. Yet it is that place and something more than that place; I would like it to point towards what is present, what resides, dwells, inhabits, what is absent, what has disappeared.

• Gradient Mervins, sumi ink and acrylic on paper, 9.5 x 12.75", 2008
• Wallmart, sumi ink and acrylic on paper, 9.5 x 12.75", 2007
• Comp USA, sumi ink and acrylic on paper, 9.5 x 12.75", 2007

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• Wal-mart, sumi ink & acrylic on paper, 9 x 12”, 2008

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• Corporate Windows, sumi ink on paper, 12 x 16", 2009
• Corporate Windows, sumi ink on paper, 9 x 24”, 2009

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• Monkey Habitat, oil on canvas, 15 x 21”, 2009

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• Forest drawing 5, charcoal on paper, 50 x 48”, 2008
• Forest drawing 4, charcoal on paper, 50 x 54”, 2008

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