Networks and Signs

As a continual psychological investigation of the contemporary human condition, my paintings examine the modification of my cognition and experience of the world in the engulfing presence of technology. Spending more and more time in the realm of information screens, sometimes I am unsure of where I stop and the world outside me begins. Screens take my passive body anywhere within seconds while passwords open windows through which arrows direct my mind. Duality of being – my experience of presentness and remoteness, predictability and randomness, order and chaos – is conveyed in my paintings as a visual negotiation of a new paradigm.

This body of work called Password: Sign Disintegration is a contemplative allegory about contemporary psychological shift in a technology-driven, information-dependent, overstimulated society. My desire is to expand and complicate these ideas with images that are suggestive of naturally occurring shapes and patterns (nets, maps, neurons, stars, globes…) in dialog with shapes generated from the human-produced, artificial world (passwords, data bodies, computer symbols, pills, networks…). The symbols on my computer, a continuous and endless number of clicks, dots, circles, lines, crosses, and arrows, depart onto canvas and disintegrate to become a psychological map, a hand-made network of a presence in time, a mark. I repeatedly render perfect, utilitarian, and timeless signs by hand to access the imperfect, contradictory, time-bound being on the other side of the screen.

Recent information science posits that our body patterns are the optimal design for building supercomputers. In the very near future technology may model itself on DNA-based evolution and create its own next generation without human intervention. Deeply interested in the visual unfolding of this scientific theory, my paintings function as environments for envisioning threads of this theory while finding my own voice in relation to predictions of the future.

My practice requires alchemical painterly innovation including the laborious preparation of a gessoed surface on canvas over panel. Using graphite and ink allows me to alternate multiple layers of drawing with thin applications of gesso while retaining a smooth, paper-like surface. A diary of daily overlapping entries results in the appearance of complicated perceptual depth.