Archive: 1999 - 2002
I construct the images for these paintings in the following manner: photographs of highways are submerged, immersed in a Photoshop filter which illuminates and emphasizes the edges of the structures in the photographs, converting these into glowing, linear forms. Minute details in the initial photographs – the brightness and slant of the sunlight, the gray of the sky, the angle from which the highways are shot – affect how the filter reacts with and transforms the photograph. I then continue to work with the resulting images, sifting to find moments which are the basis for the paintings. In this sense, I consider the images in my paintings found – records of an actual space, a fictional light landscape without physical form.
I chose highways and their monumental architecture because they are static structures synonymous with, and located most often in, movement. They echo in a nationwide system of circulation the physiological transportation systems in the human body I referenced in my earlier work. Along night highways, lights are indicators of motion, and my paintings begin in this space, where high speed appears as slowly gliding, flickering light.
I use the filter for its relationship to the lines that hover as both linear element and form in my earlier paintings, as well as its addition of a light and patterning similar (although more complex) to the video I shot when first developing my idea. This filter provides a way to continue my dialogue with line, as well as geometric patterning, as I incorporate photographic images into my paintings.
By merging the photographic image with paint, I create a friction between the time embodied within each medium, one which informs my decision to translate my images into paintings rather than prints. Because I have used video stills and currently Photoshop to compose the images for my paintings, I approach time in my paintings as photographic – a simultaneous instant in which motion is frozen. Paint, however, is a medium which, to quote Marlene Dumas, “doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns.” It is also a medium with literal substance, and in dealing with images depicting light, adds a strange materiality. It is this place, where the handmade meets the machine-made and time is both an instant and a continuous flow, that I wish to both evoke and further explore.
I chose highways and their monumental architecture because they are static structures synonymous with, and located most often in, movement. They echo in a nationwide system of circulation the physiological transportation systems in the human body I referenced in my earlier work. Along night highways, lights are indicators of motion, and my paintings begin in this space, where high speed appears as slowly gliding, flickering light.
I use the filter for its relationship to the lines that hover as both linear element and form in my earlier paintings, as well as its addition of a light and patterning similar (although more complex) to the video I shot when first developing my idea. This filter provides a way to continue my dialogue with line, as well as geometric patterning, as I incorporate photographic images into my paintings.
By merging the photographic image with paint, I create a friction between the time embodied within each medium, one which informs my decision to translate my images into paintings rather than prints. Because I have used video stills and currently Photoshop to compose the images for my paintings, I approach time in my paintings as photographic – a simultaneous instant in which motion is frozen. Paint, however, is a medium which, to quote Marlene Dumas, “doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns.” It is also a medium with literal substance, and in dealing with images depicting light, adds a strange materiality. It is this place, where the handmade meets the machine-made and time is both an instant and a continuous flow, that I wish to both evoke and further explore.
