Until Aug 16 2019
Muscle
memory describes the ability to clone a gesture without conscious thought.
Unconscious actions are learned through repetition: by performing the same task
habitually, we lose awareness of the task itself. By storing a cache of
automated movements in our body, we untether from the recollections lodged in
our mind.
In a
culture saturated in images, in a climate where we are expected to proliferate
our physical selves endlessly (through our labor and images of the self), our
consciousness experiences a scattering, or stuttering. By projecting the self
in perpetuity, we become disassociated from our sense of ourselves.
When I make
my work, I choose images of things closest to me: my clothes, my wife’s clothes, her body, my
body, our food, the plants in our apartment, my tools. These are intimate and
introverted things that illuminate the most basic functions of living: moving, dressing, eating, sheltering, touching, interacting, offering, sharing and
working. They are objects that allude to their proximity to the body (often
framed like rectangular torsos in the most recent works) and the habitual
repetitions we perform. Our possessions and our choices represent us, but they
do not stay still. In their multiplicity, they form a portrait of a life,
lived.
The works
in the exhibition are made using inkjet transfer and acrylic paint on clothing
or stretched, layered canvas. They incorporate gestures from photography,
printmaking, sewing, painting and performance. The transfer technique allows me
to literally “paint with images” as if a stroke or spill of paint magnetically
attracted photographic imagery to the substrate.
While
cooking dinner with my wife recently, she noted that all the works in the show
depicted a garment: my plaid shirts, her dress, a yellow rain coat, a “rain
pattern” camouflage jacket, a work apron, a shredded skeleton t-shirt I’ve been
wearing for 20 years. I cannot hide from her influence. Her immersion in
clothing as assistant curator at the Costume Institute has made me rethink
received hierarchies about art and art history. It has redefined my thinking
about the expressions of the self.
I’d been working intuitively all year, and over dinner with
her, I had to articulate what I saw in the work: a heavy weight of mortality
and gravity, gestures of offering, sharing, sheltering, preserving. Pictures of
material accumulation and substance pouring down; works wet, humid and
saturated; skins practically drowning in bounty and overgrowth. The vine
tattooed on my wife’s leg climbs up toward the floral embroidery of her dress;
a rain coat lapped by leaves of kale or exploded by late summer sunflowers;
bulbous pears popping off the armature of a rib cage; potatoes coughing out of
a skeleton’s chest; hands catching rain; fingers dangling a soaked pair of
Vans.
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