Statement

I am examining the relationship between representation and abstraction in both painting and cinema, borrowing the language from one medium to inform the creation of the other. Film is a reference material and catalyst for analysis in my paintings, serving as visual information to break apart, analyze, and synthesize into new worlds of my own invention. I utilize archetypal film imagery to examine the affect film has over the way that people perceive, imagine, and remember space. My approach considers that both painting and film function as virtual spaces, but that the two media have opposite means of presenting such space. My concerns with these spatial experiences stem in two directions, involving the way that film and like media might interfere with memory, and the way space is built and experienced for us in cinema.

By rearranging literal time and space, film mimics memory and internal thought. Remembrance asks that we suspend time to experience the past in the present. In many ways, to remember is to create a new world by evoking things that no longer exist, and never actually existed exactly as we recall. The accessibility of film complicates this issue, in that it works to create “universal” memories. I am interested in using this collective imagery to create distinct, imagined scenes.

Film is a unique medium, architectonically. Other visual media offer the opportunity for an “all at once” view. We typically understand works and the space that they embody by first seeing a whole, and then examining details. Film reverses that process; we understand space the same way that we understand narrative, building a whole by slowly accumulating its parts. This slow construction also works to simultaneously personalize and universalize, as viewers are provided with a specific point of view, but one that is shared.

In painting, I take fragments of various places as portrayed in film and combine them into single spaces, transferring the way an environment is presented in film into the compressed, static space of a painting. The combinations of different locations and juxtaposed interior and exterior environments, allow multiple places and times to be experienced and compared simultaneously. The availability of film and the commonness of its visual tropes add a familiar or universal sense to my invented scenes, and allow certain common features to communicate or echo from painting to painting. Currently, I am focusing on particular cinematic spaces that feature moments of transition: thresholds, portals, and scene changes. I am particularly interested in the overlap that occurs between natural and built spaces in these types of compositions. Through the translation of various sources into painting, I invite exploration into the synthesis of real and contrived environments.