The tapestry paintings and the land.

Seascape: Migration and the San Bernardino mountains, October 2024

I often take the tapestry paintings to various outdoor locations in Southern California: urban and rural settings, as well as into the mountains and the desert where I temporarily install and film them in the course of a few hours, observing the invited and accidental encounters between the paintings and the place. I record the

connection of the paintings to “place” and explore how their meaning is variable and I

suspect contingent on particular geographies.

Recording occurs through photographs, films, sound recordings, drawings and writing

– all are my attempt to be a witness in real time. The paintings themselves record

the experience with dust, rips and tears, etc. that become part of their new material

embodiment. My recordings are further abstracted in new paintings so that each painting

inspires, contributes and collaborates with the next like a codex unfolding both

materially and cosmologically.

Kukeri: Trembling Sun, 2023, Acrylic and gauze on muslin (double-sided), 120 x 84"

The scope of engagement with the environment includes abandoned infrastructure and

in-between places; the ruins of forgotten dreams or technological follies, neglected

recreational urban spaces, defunct mines, and concrete barriers that keep “nature” at

bay.

The gauze paintings at Echo Mountain peak, 2021.

Development of project 2018-present:

Installation of the tapestry paintings at Transformative Arts, DTLA, September 2022.

I experienced an epiphany in March 2018, and took my paintings off the stretchers to

make tapestry paintings on the floor that relied on mono printing, frottage, and staining. I

had been feeling burdened by my work and intensely aware of my physical, emotional,

and financial precarity – similar sensations that led to our initial migration to the US. I

had this feeling, so I took the roll of raw muslin and simply let it fall to the ground. It

unrolled about 80” wide (my arm span) and 120” tall. I wanted to make my paintings

unburdened: no structure, no trained eyes, no sense of purpose aside from recording

the terrain with my 15” wide brush. Suddenly I had so many images and pathways to

follow. I wanted the skin of the painting to absorb and record both the terrain of the floor

and its own textural complexity. They are a record of the “touching” that happens in the

process between the world and my interiority, a messy mixture of memory, feeling and

intuition. As records, the paintings are both abstract and concrete and therefore

“unfinished”, because the process isn’t finalized or fixed. My approach is to reopen the

process of painting through looking, touching and sensing.

During Covid, I started to place these paintings outside in natural settings where there

are other things: dirt, trees, birds, asphalt. There is more touching there, there is life

there. Elements like light and wind open the painting to embodied experience. The

paintings become travelers and talismans that you can carry with you as you cross

borders. These talismans are both a part of me and separate from me and unfurling

them allows for dynamic transmutations and transmogrifications.

Most recently I installed the paintings in the courtyard of Night Gallery and filmed them over the course of a few days observing the effects of the wind and changing light.

Installation at Night Gallery (North), July 2024.

The paintings are open to a dialog with a viewer and a place. Context is key because as

the location changes, so too do the paintings. The collaboration with the environment

has visible effects on the painting ensuring that the process never ends. Evidence of

this exposure isn’t restored, but patched, adding beauty like a scar on the body as proof

of life. Nothing ruins them. This is the freedom my work seeks in my new understanding

of my own relationship to the material. The collaboration is muted when the interactions

and the lives of the paintings are silenced or unseen. When paintings are in relationship

with each other and the elements or a sensitive seeking person, the extra aliveness -

the emergent- becomes perceptible. I am trying to access that space and that feeling by

focusing and finding abstraction and concreteness in dust - in the elemental

characteristics, stories, memories and materials that thrive in the between.

Seascape: Migration on the flood wall in San Bernardino, CA. (October 2024)