Moving, Looking, Making
Images extend, amplify, and delimit actual spaces. All of my work examines the nature of this relationship, showing that the boundary between images and actual spaces is a dynamic and nuanced membrane. In other words, there is a direct, significant, and reciprocal relationship between images, which we tend to qualify as something other than “real”, and the nature of the world we inhabit. Sensing this is by turns exhilarating and sobering; I deal with it in a number of ways. One approach is to make paintings that captivate the eye and then change as the gaze is held over time: the optical color effect known as "simultaneous contrast" produces illusory glowing edges where nearly-complementary hues meet. Just as this becomes fully apparent, a new optical sensation emerges: highly saturated colors induce retinal fatigue, giving rise to afterimages similar in value to the underpainting but slightly different in hue. These phenomena compete with what is actually present, thereby producing an uncanny sensation of spatial depth in a canvas one knows, intellectually, to be flat, and which is otherwise composed without recourse to perspectival devices. In this way, abstraction and landscape figuration compete for pictorial dominance, calibrating the eye to appreciate the phenomenological richness of the worlds that surround us all the time.