[Music]
>> Hi, everybody. I just want to quickly thank Bruce Hartman for the opportunity to be part of this exhibition.
I thank my fellow artists involved with it. It's been fun to see the show come together.
I was here in February to install my piece, but not many of the other works were up then,
so it was a real treat to come back and see everything together.
Also, thanks to Whitney, Hema, Art and the rest of the group here who made everything so easy,
and also to Alice Thorson for her thoughtful writing.
I also want to thank my mom and dad for letting me crash while I'm staying here. They even let me have my own bedroom.
This is my piece. It's entitled "8.25 Minutes", and it's from 2017.
This is the second place it's existed. The first was an exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2017.
I'm going to quickly fly through a little bit of where I've been, and hopefully tie some things together where this work came from.
I'm also going to fly through some images as well.
This is perhaps the stupidest painting I've ever made, but I think you'll all be familiar ...
It's not showing up. I was going to pull the cursor on top of it. Oh, there it is!
We're familiar with that. I'll just leave them up there for a while.
That's our way of moving around that digital space and saying "Will you be my friend?", "I really like that photo you took!",
"These are the shoes that I'd really like to buy", "I need to put that on my wish list", "I need some more information about that",
[and] "If I just keep searching, I'm going to find some more", so we're always reaching out.
Now, we even do it on our tablets, so we're always looking and longing for something.
As I think back about it, much as my work has been about that attempt to tie or find these things that we're looking for and wanting.
I've thought about this in terms of what we do as humans. We make, mark and design things.
You're sitting in a chair that somebody designed. You might walk through downtown Kansas City and find some graffiti.
That's somebody's way of saying "I was here, I existed, I did something". We're surrounded by those things and they all have intention to them.
Some of my work pulls from a variety of things. They tend towards abstraction,
but there are times where I'll find something that's in a photographic form, or something
like a moon and a mountain juxtaposed against each other. Not photographic, but more something you might find on a cave wall.
The sense of touch is really important for me, that something has a haptic sense to it,
that you can feel its crumbliness or something like that.
I saw "Stalker" earlier this year, and my phone went off and the very last minute of the movie. Not a proud moment for me.
But it's that sense of touch and handling of something that's existed in the world [which] is
This is a group of paintings that I hung together at a show in 2013.
It gives you [some] sense of what might be going on in my studio, and how those things might come together.
In the past, there's not always been a single way of making a painting,
but maybe there are lots of questions that I'm putting out there, not knowing the answers for them, but trying to find out what's going on,
trying to work through my feelings and my thoughts in that world around me.
In 2013, I was really lucky to spend some time in Marfa, Texas,
at a place called the Chinati Foundation, founded by the sculptor, Donald Judd.
I had a residency there for two months, and during those two months, I went around and photographed the town.
I saw amazing, cobbled together architecture like this, but I might walk the next street over,
and see some architect from New York or LA who had designed a magnificent home as well,
so there were a whole lot of things I was encountering there.
I was also really taken with the light that I was seeing there, like I thought I could see the colors more truly,
but also be blinded by their light.
This is a painting that I made while I was there, and I was thinking about something like viewing the warmth of a hearth of fire,
but what does that feel like or look like, if you were watching it on the cold blue of a television screen?
This is just putting these propositions out there and following them through to see what they
Every day was really affected by the amount of light I was experiencing there,
how you would stare at something at midday, and it would "burn" itself into your eyes, whatever it might be.
[Even when] you looked away, you'd still continue to see it.
While I was there, I also started investigating this image.
I think we can all understand the "pull" of these images of nature that we encounter.
This one had a personal meaning for me, because it had been the stock photo that was on my parents' photo album when I was a child.
We can understand that sentiment of: here's a family of birds.
It's the same way that we see a photograph of a sunset on a refrigerator or on our desktop, or
Even when we're inside, away from nature, we want to be tied back to it,
so I started taking this image, not really knowing what I was going to do with it, but taking it apart and reassembling it.
Here's me drawing in the studio, using inkjet for the color and a Xerox machine for the black and white,
but I continued to make these drawings, cutting, pasting and reassembling them.
Then, I started working on these paintings. They're about 11 inches by 8 inches, about the size of a head or mask of the face.
I wanted to keep pulling that sense of the light that I was experiencing in West Texas, while I had been at the Chinati Foundation,
and allow the paintings to have the sort of DNA of that original image of those gulls,
but also exist like an afterimage, as if we've stared too long at the light.
I made quite a few of these small ones, sitting in the back room of my studio over the fall of 2013, and I was working on them all at the same time.
I thought of them as all coming from the same place, but then seeing these really dramatic,
Here, you can see a wall of them hung together,
one painting based off that image, but it just kept giving more and more images.
This is the last one of that that I'll show. I just want to bring us back to this for a second.
I think most of us have had an experience of sitting around a campfire or maybe a fire pit near your house,
but there's that moment where maybe you're there with others and somebody's telling a story,
or maybe you're there by yourself and you get lost and stare in the fire's flickering light.
That idea of the sorts of things that glow and emanate light was really weighing on me,
and affecting how I was thinking about color as an artist.
We look at the moon, our tablets and our phones, things that emanate light and they hold us captive.
Here's an image of a flower that I used in some additional paintings, a sort of alien-looking passionflower.
There's those gulls again. I'd made all these tiny paintings and I felt like I needed to change the scope of the work,
so I started working on this painting, which is eight feet by twenty feet.
You can see on one side the gull image is sort of tilted over and somewhat laying on its side.
On the other side is that image of the passionflower. You think of a flower as a compact thing, but it's also exploding outward.
I think I wanted to tie into this almost sublime feeling.
You're using these natural things, approximating the glow of a digital screen,
but also something that begins to wrap its arms around, or be bigger than the viewer,
so the only way to view it is to either be thirty feet back from it,
or to be in it and really scanning it as you walk past it, viewing it in motion.
Here's another image with those birds. They really become "decompressed" and begin to float away, the image becoming unmoored.
It's like a memory we're trying to hold on to, like Christina talked about.
There are these moments where the memory also feels like it's drifting away or you can't quite hold on to it.
I'm asking questions of myself: "What's it like to be watching the dying embers of a fire, but watching it on my computer screen?
Or is it like flying over Los Angeles at 30,000 feet?" There's a sort of commonality there.
Some of those are things floating around in my studio, and how I've been thinking about my work.
That brings me here to "8.25 Minutes", which is the time it takes light to travel from the Sun to
When I started thinking I didn't know that title, and I started working on it, but it's what I arrived at.
In my studio, I had lots of different things I was looking at.
I had found this book about Pompeii, and I was really intrigued by these domestic spaces that were just filled with images,
paintings on the walls and mosaics. They were preserved, because that that city was [buried under volcanic activity].
Our benefit: do we get to see these things because they're buried as they were, but also the destruction tied to that as well?
Often, so many of these interior spaces had images of nature in them. Again, that's something that we keep coming back to.
Another thing that I was thinking about would be something like Philip Johnson's Glass House.
What a magnificent piece of architecture to be in, look out of and have the world just at arm's length, always sort of there.
But as I thought about, I asked, " Would I really want to live there, aside from jokes about throwing stones?
and where you might use the bathroom?" It's nice to be there but would you really want to live there?
So, there was both a joy at that place, but also ... I don't know. I like the theory, but I'm not sure if I could handle it.
Other things floating around my studio, thinking of water lines, whether it's something like this,
which is more like geographic striations of where the water has been;
or something like a scenario where you see the homes after Katrina, where you have the level of the water slowly going down;
or even something like the inkjet print from your computer where you're running out of ink.
These were some of the feelings, the sources, the well stones that I was looking at,
as I was beginning to craft these paintings for the installation.
I may be showing you too much behind the scenes. This is one of the source photographs that I was using.
I was in a museum in Miami, taking a break from looking at the art. I looked out the window, towards the garden.
There's all this lush foliage, bamboo and such, but there also was my reflection,
and reflections of the walls and the fluorescent lights of the space that I was in, all sandwiched on the "skin" of that window.
It felt like this space of the screen that we might touch and interact with. I'll show you just a few more of these.
Even the color wanting it to be like maybe that inkjet print, that luminosity of a screen.
It's cyan, magenta, yellow and black sort of colors. Just one or two more little things, here.
You might have noticed that there are these bits of paper on the back and these things floating around the studio as well.
Emily Dickinson, on the little scraps of paper she would compose on and work out our poems referred to those as "gorgeous nothings".
I think of these little things on the backs of the paintings as my gorgeous nothings.
They contain everything in them, but they're also mysteries at the same time.
If they weren't on the back of that painting, I'd hope that maybe if you saw them on a tabletop or on the floor,
you might have to pick them up and take care of them.
This is [the piece] installed last year.
I'm going to bring this to a close, and what I'll do is there's a poem that I've been really obsessed with over the last couple years.
You'll have to excuse my voice, but listen to the words. It's from Osip Mandelstom, a poet.
It's called "I was alive". "I was alive in in the blizzard of the blossoming pear.
Myself, I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree, and all was leaf life and starshower, unerring and self shattering power,
and it was all aimed at me. What is this dire delight flowering, fleeing always earth?
What is being, what is truth? Blossoms rupture and rapture the air, all hover and hammer.
Time intensified and time intolerable. Sweetness, raveling rot. It is now, it is not.
Thank you very much and thank you for letting me share that one with you.