Serenade: NAAU Couture’08:3, Stipend Series Award, New American Art Union, Portland, Oregon, Juror: Ruth Ann Brown, July 2008

Utilizing the gallery as an installation, I’m creating a solid series of paintings protruding and receding into space. In addressing the monochromatic, reflection, transparency and literalizing the use of light, the work realizes one of the early dreams of abstract art and the monochrome: a potential drift into a kind of optical space. Though what it is we so palpably experience in the installation may be difficult to specify, it is not an illusion. Light may be humanly produced or controlled, but it is hard to grasp how it could be artificial in its behavior. In this exhibition we see light working in space and on surfaces. By examining and experimenting with the nature of a painting’s surface, space and the painting’s relationship to humanity, I’m exploring a familiar vernacular. 

I use abstraction to achieve a visual democracy, where you can really make choices about what you’re looking at: “Is this a reflection or architecture?” I’m not interested in having a passive experience, rather in exploring all the ways in which a painting can be. By taking on the idea of what makes a painting work in space, I’ve focused in on liberating the frame of abstraction, celebrating one’s method of seeing, thereby changing the world.