“Untitled Man I”, 2011, Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 32 inches
About the Exhibition
The airport series and crowd series continues my exploration of surveillance images as a subject matter for my paintings. Sourced by a variety of methods, these images are all mediated through video and captured as screen images that are then the subject of paintings.
Airliners and airports represent the ideal subject for an investigation into the nature of surveillance; airports are our literally our culture’s crossroads and airliners have a conflicting history representing escape and threat concurrently. I am less interested in making specific commentary with the work than passively presenting it and letting the viewer determine their own position.
For this series, I created a blue-hued color palette derived directly from the black and white video surveillance monitors and use the grid to provide a structural coherence at odds with the ambiguous nature of the image. Defining this structure helps me to organize my thinking and closes the loop with my aesthetic and conceptual concerns.
The layers of mediation are critical. As an artist, there is something very contemporary about the removal and distance of this remote viewpoint. In many ways, it is analogous to how we experience so much of life today. Combining this mediation, the subject matter and the painting technique creates an image that is both recognizable and ambiguous leaving the viewer in a questioning state relying on their own experiences to complete and infill the narrative.
This distance is further reinforced by the methods and processes I developed to create the work. I use advanced linear motion technology and proprietary software of my own design to achieve a level of precision that allows me to carefully isolate, manipulate and corrupt specific aspects of the process to create images.
