Artist Statement
Suspended Spring
My paintings explore formal relationships through recurring geometric forms bound to a system of constraints. The reappearance of the same geometric forms across the body of work allows them to become familiar to the viewer, but their endless material manifestations and relationships mean constant reconsideration.
Fundamentally, the simplicity of the forms I utilize means minimal attention paid to their shape and maximal attention paid to their relationships. Their ability to slide along spectrums—circle to square, for example—makes them malleable despite their geometry. While the ways they are painted may mean that their square-dom or circle-dom fall secondary to something else, that underlying geometry remains.
Forms exist in a flexible space that they may sink into, emerge from, or sit on top of. Single-colored grounds even the field that the forms occupy and flatten the picture plane. Space ends at the surface’s edges, containing forms within those bounds and making each painting an isolated ecology within which forms materialize out of and disappear into. Formal qualities and material handling amplify or obfuscate the forms’ legibility and complicate their presence within the compositional space.
Each form occupies an individualized locale, distinguished from the next and not overlapping any other. Their placement and relationships to each other (and the ground) create environments that allow viewers to consider the familiar and the unfamiliar, and ultimately how significance can fabricate out of something inconclusive. Depending on these conditions and the viewer’s point of view, forms may allude to something external—yet, they retain their non-objectivity, existing tensely between the tangible and the intangible.
