BIO, STATEMENT
CV
PROJECTS
PRESS
LINKS
CONTACT
Artist’s Statement
February 2005
Camouflages 2004
MFA Thesis Project, CalArts
In Mythologies, Roland Barthes speaks of the sign as being empty of meaning when appropriated by the intentions of myth: “When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.” I am intrigued by this idea of emptying and reassigning arbitrary meaning to an iconographic sign at the point at which “it becomes [merely] form” and have explored possible ways of doing so through the visual experience inherent in viewing paintings. In recent projects, I have employed a strategy of systematic processes to achieve painterly effects as a way of reassigning or emptying iconographic meaning. A mirroring between process and representation is a central aspect to this reinscription, whereby what is being represented and the means by which it is being represented share conceptual significance. The representation thus serves as a model for its critical content.
Camouflages (2004) is a series of ten paintings presenting ideas related to camouflage independent from its militaristic association. In these representations, the patterned iconography performs its literal function of masking and disguising through formal mimicry. For example, in some of the paintings the camouflage is indistinguishably merged with a decorative pattern, each camouflaging the other, emphasizing the decorative aspect of the iconography and shifting its semiotic location to a decorative domestic realm. In others, the origin of the pattern as a mimicry of nature becomes the subject of the paintings; the pattern is printed with transparency and extensive layering to evoke the atmospheric in relation to landscape. My aim is to subvert the viewer’s expectations of camouflage as militaristic by instead providing the possibility of diffused readings through an experience of contemplative visual pleasure.
The camouflaging of the mechanical printing process as a painterly gestural one is a political as well as experiential aspect of the paintings. Only when the viewer confronts the painting at a close distance does it become clear that the visual effect is the result of layered printing. This visual ambiguity, resulting in images mimicking conventions of the “heroic” in painting, is an attempt to redefine the language and ideology of painting convention itself. This poses the possibility of addressing the political with a subversive and deconstructive language of painting, whether the image is situated within the conventions of the representational, of abstraction, or of pattern and decoration.