Artist Statement
My current paintings and drawings are based on Chinese scholar's rocks and Zen rock gardens, objects of meditation and reflection. Much of the texture and detail in these paintings derives from glitches of information passing from documentary photographs, through stenciling software, and onto canvas. Errors of calculation and discoloration inform the image, often substantially reinventing it. The original stones are a muted, removed influence.
In all of my work, whether sculpture, installation, or painting, I've used highly rationalized processes in erratic ways, to mirror back upon their own making. While obsolescence is the passing into disuse of useful things -- systems, machines, techniques -- art, without the same usefulness or purpose, stands in a different, speculative relation to time.
About Ryoan-Ji (3)
This installation of paintings is based upon the 14th-century stone garden at the temple of Ryoan-Ji in Kyoto, Japan. This garden is carefully composed of 15 moss-covered boulders placed in a long, rectangular bed of raked gravel. This panoramic tableau cannot be fully perceived from a single vantage point; from the viewing platform, one can only see 14 of the rocks at a time. The garden is a meditation on landscape, a space deliberately created with the intent of slowing down and framing the act of looking.
Countless visitors have photographed partial views of Ryoan-Ji. Their photographs, freely distributed on the Internet, are the basis for each individual painting. What happens if I combine these singular and diverse points of view into a new panorama? How authentic is such a representation? As I transfer these images to the canvas, layering detail of rocks and gravel into the painting, I am somehow brought closer to the garden, although I've never been to Japan. Indeed, my interest in this project is driven in large part from the idea of representing a place I've never seen in person.