Constructions 1  .  Signing (Utopia)

The "Constructions" series sprang from a long-term investigation into the material and physiological aspects of culture and perception. I began with the premise that the criticism of conceptual art as inaccessible was a valid point rooted in the severance of art's experiential qualities from the domain of visceral response. I sought to discover points of tangible engagement. My research into biology, culture and history coincided with the ascendance of new media. Living and working at its source I became sensitized to the narrow bravado that drives the development of digital replacements of the physical world and to the close intellectual ties that exist between the technologists and the metaphor-inspired theorists whose works I was studying.

It came to seem to me in considering the popular ideation of the physical body as inadequate and the theoretical analogization of mental processes to digital machinations that software-driven tools are open to the same criticisms that technological evangelists levy on the human form. Simultaneously, the physical aspects of the new habit of snapshooting, handling, sharing and viewing or not viewing seemed to reinforce those same scientific theories, which describe perception in terms of the flickering, selectively capturing eye and the fabricating mind, while the cannibalistic approach of marketers promoting their substitutions seemed justified and probably set in motion by the formal theories of decades prior.

In this ongoing series, I use elements of traditional painting and digital photography to create materially explicit apparent realities with represented and actual time components. These works assemble unmodified inkjet photographs, fabrication media and oil paint, a traditional element that completes the scene while chemically degrading contact points of the paper over time. Moving through a place and shooting from the hip, I use consumer-grade cameras to collect large sets of artifacted glances. In the studio, I print, reprint and shuffle, selecting a subset that both echoes my memories of the location and adheres to the dimensional constraints of the foundation panel, which I use as found. I then complete the reconstruction using a palette that corresponds to the Epson Ultrachrome set printed using Photo Enhance, a prefabricated setting tailored for wide appeal.