3 photos of my studio and me on the beach in North Truro, photos courtesy of Alan Herman (alanhermanphotography.com and IG @alan.herman).
I primarily work with discarded packaging that has served its usefulness in storing, transporting and displaying food and commercial goods. Using these remnants of other activities, I focus on the visual experiences of spatial placement, proximity and location. I embrace the challenge of making work that is transparent in its materiality. Random images created by my process-reliant practice produce ambiguous content, creating a passageway for the viewer.
From my collection of commercial packaging, I have created an extensive storehouse of tools and methods for using them. Stencils, flattened packaging employed as shapes for outlines, and found code-like images found on commercial packaging deepen the work’s complexity and self-referential quality. I create the spatial aspects of my work by using my collections of tools.
The connection between my work as an artist and the workers who use the boxes in their jobs to transport food is subliminal, vague and felt, not expressly spelled out. Concerns about sustainability, about over abundance, about favoring the too easily attainable “new” are subconscious drivers in my work. The paintings’ surfaces, with their brokenness, disturbed corners, tears and rips revealing the interior ask the viewer to move away from perfection and the expected and toward embracing in a new way material that has served a function that we all invariably depend on. The commercial packaging now lives in a new space.
For me there is an essential, ever-present conversation between painting and drawing, with one feeding the other. My drawings are not preparatory sketches for paintings but exist as distinct bodies of work. Reference sources are farm machinery manuals, typographers’ catalogues and printed aspects of the boxes I work with. Then, in turn, the exploratory territory of the drawn images is brought back into the painting. The flattened, painted boxes receive these drawn aspects of work and industry and become something new.
I am currently working on paintings using the shipping boxes and my collection of commercial packaging. Drawings based on source material with meaning for my work take a central place in my studio practice.
FURTHER THOUGHTS
I believe in chance and chaos, in letting abstract images emerge through the physical process of painting that produces various emotions, as the intensification of the work develops, avoiding the expression of an literal emotion, or references to actual things in the world. Remaining detached from conscious definition creates a space where a viewer can experience their own emotions through my work. The visual results I achieve give me a sense of where I am, what window I’m looking through and what might be over there, away from me, but important to connect with.
The physicality of my work clearly and intentionally lets me simultaneously work on making a painting and creating an object. The inherent nature of how I make my work and the materials I depend on (primarily discarded corrugate boxes as well as other found material) result in pieces that at times move away from the wall while remaining fixed to it and always have some aspect that resists any sense of machine-like regularity. This helps me break away from making an image on a conventional surface toward the duality of making an object that is also a painting and vice versa.
RECENT ACTIVITIES
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant / 2025
I have received an individual support grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Twenty artists were selected from an international pool of 865 applicants. I am deeply honored to have been chosen and to be in the group of talented, hardworking artists who have also received a support grant.
KIPNZ Gallery Solo Show Upstate & Pop-Up at Diana on Henry Street, NYC /2024
I presented a solo show of paintings, drawings and small constructions at KIPNZ Gallery in July 2024 and followed it up with a three-person show at Diana on Henry Gallery in Lower Manhattan.
NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship Program / 2023
I have been selected as a Finalist in NYFA/NYSCA’s 2023 Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts category. I submitted work from the Spark Drawings. See the complete NYSCA/NYFA category list here.
NYSCA Artist Support Grant - The Maintenance Project / 2023
I’ve been awarded a NYSCA Artist Support grant for The Maintenance Project that will be completed in 2024. My project is based on images and diagrams found in historical farm machinery manuals from the 1940s and ‘50s. From this material, I’m assembling source books, making drawings, developing an exhibit and creating a short film. This project will be completed with the support of The West Kortright Centre, a regional performance, exhibition and community arts center in Delaware County, NY.
NYFA Keeping NYS Creating Award / 2020
I was awarded a NYFA grant to continue work interrupted by the Covid pandemic.
RESIDENCIES AND NOMINATIONS
St. Gaudens Fellowship: In 2022 I was nominated for a St. Gaudens fellowship.
Ellis-Beauregard Foundation: In April of 2022, I was a painting resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Maine.
Vermont Studio Center: In March of 2018 I was a painting resident at The Vermont Studio Center.
Anderson Ranch: In 2019 I was awarded a ten-week residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO. While there, I focused on painting, and had the opportunity to work in other studios. I made a collection of laser-cut stencils using linear Illustrator files to use as tools in my paintings and also produced a series of monoprints.
