BFA, Studio Art
Dual Discipline Focus
Primary Focus: Painting & Drawing
Secondary Focus: Printmaking & Book Arts
Artist Statement
The Languish Enguage
The Languish Enguage is a series of paintings evolved from source photographs of garage interiors, which function as scaffolding for considering perception. The interconnected, arbitrary rules of spoken language act as a visual metaphor in each painting. This investigation was prompted by an experience speaking another language and then returning to the strangeness of one’s native tongue. Although the paintings reference tangible subject matter such as text or clothing, they are disassembled and withholding, leaving the viewer in a suspended state of uncertainty to contemplate the abstraction of the everyday.
Only the most essential information is presented; minimal perspectival lines capture the “spaceness” of a space, or a few red stripes capture the “American flagness” of an American flag. These crucial marks offer partial signifiers of ubiquitous visual information efficiently. The effects are large-scale Gestalt puzzles that disrupt an otherwise immediate reading of the familiar.
A washy ground layer expressively details a guide to the space, while more legible marks hint at a clearer iconography. Thick, sculpted paint suggests isolated symbols while subtle color shifts, optical illusions, visual noise, and paint textures further complicate the space.
In effect, the relationship between semiotics and perception is exaggerated, and as if seeing your mother tongue as a second language, you see, unsee, and see again. More than depicting a specific space, these paintings capture the nature of meaning and our often distanced relation to it.
