Artist’s Statement

Each painting in my recent Through the Veil series begins with a rendering from a closely observed fabric with wrinkles and folds. They recapitulate the compositional structure of a painting/drawing by artists from the past and present. The fabric in these paintings acts as a limen or threshold that places the viewer into multiple, often conflicting, layers of space and meaning. In the series the Rabbit or environment may be stretched or manipulated through Photoshop to create a sense of instability, heightened emotion, or a digital sifting. The paintings good-humoredly deconstruct imagery from pop, outsider, and high culture to create new “spaces” of meaning. The shape-shifting Rabbit is positioned in front of or behind; it looks into, out, around or between images and spaces. The paintings use dark humor, visual puns, symbols and metaphors, moments of silence, art historical allusions, cultural collisions, and spiritual conundrums to play with style and pictorial/formal construction.

In Targeting Tuyman’s Rabbit the targeted image is a painting of a rabbit seen through a television screen by contemporary Belgian painter Luc Tuyman. A hummingbird from a recent book of science illustration hovers in a forward space and approaches the bull’s eye of the spatially ambiguous target where lips emerge from cloth wrinkles. The hummingbird is both investigator and activator of the silent lips; it conceptually targets the lips/eye of the “text” to reveal multivalent possibilities contained in ambiguously targeted spaces. Unveiling Celaya’s Veil unravels the silence in Enrique Martinez Celaya’s painting The Veil where an unclothed boy lies in a snowy forest while catching a rabbit. The black Rabbit in the upper left of the painting comes from an 18th century silhouette. It flies toward a circle of disembodied Christ-child heads from Renaissance nativity paintings and a 1930’s jack-o-lantern that surround a veiled Fra Angelico Christ Child emitting a sound wave. Similar to Celaya’s work, the painting both acknowledges and cracks open European canonical painting. Is the sound wave a warning, greeting, or SOS? Devouring and Reconstructing Kali reverses the narrative of a 19th-century Indian miniature of Vikramaditya Devoured and Revived by Kali. The Rabbit both emerges from and remains part of the fabric creases while holding a rope tied around a mountain with an embedded Kali face and vintage pansy. Attributes of the goddess Kali (the destroyer) are in the landscape along with an 18th-century woodcut of a rabbit cut in two. The painting uncovers the process of its making through “devouring and reconstructing” images. In Playing Chess with Duchamp abstracted and representational elements emerge from and submerge into the fabric and chessboard. Duchamp’s signature in the lower right corner is backward as is the fluctuating image of Duchamp’s Chess Players, putting the viewer (and rabbit) into a space somewhere behind the painting and fabric. The Rabbit determinedly paints an Easter egg while both are being swept-up by and altered through the chessboard or “game” of the painting. In Front of Piero’s Resurrection translates Piero’s painting into folds and wrinkles that reveal several partial images of the Resurrection. In front of the fabric a Victorian Easter card rabbit morphs as it encounters Ugrasura (the snake demon) who wraps around the back of the painting. The Luca Signorelli cloud with an embedded face hangs over the action. Through Darger’s Eyes takes a section from one of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls collage/drawings. Selected images outlined in white emerge from the fabric wrinkles that reiterate the compositional structure in Darger’s artwork. The Rabbit (here as Darger) is an amalgamation of one of Darger’s girls and a vintage image of a rabbit.  One girl hands Darger a snake (a recently discovered pentimento of a coiled serpent in the hand of a late 16th-century portrait of Queen Elizabeth I). Another girl begins to transform the surrounding fabric with a magic wand. The painting creates a transformative world where his girls have the power to transfigure him. The underlying fabric in Mettre Monet en Abime moves in and out of an image of Monet’s Bathing at La Grenouillere. The painting contains a reflection in water that mirrors the landscape of the original painting with the addition of a hovering “Rabbit Buddha” seated in lotus position and intently staring at the viewer while empty boats waiting at the dock invite passengers (viewers) to take a “voyage.” The Rabbit Buddha is a union of images: a Tang Dynasty ink drawing of Buddha and vintage rabbit head (created from a mirror image of the rabbit’s profile). This “light” romp through internal mirroring or mise en abyme presents “undecidable” options among a series of determinate constructions. See Brown depicts a melting chocolate rabbit in front of a backdrop that includes a 1940’s Valentines Day cartoon of a phallic-looking thermometer changing into a rabbit among numerous copulating rabbits.  The rabbits and abstract expressionist facture of the backdrop comically allude to the eroticism in Cecily Brown’s recent paintings that undercut the work of the previous generation of male abstract expressionists. The symbolic lotus blossom in the bottom right subverts the painting’s narrative of sex, aging, and death. The title See Brown is a visual pun on several levels:  it asks the viewer to see the Brown, alludes to Cecily Brown, and implies the brown or chocolate “sea” in which the lily and the rabbit float. The television screen in the middle of Cable or Dish? pictures a rabbit with bowtie performing or being forced to perform an impossible backbend while images of the Virgin and St. Joseph (from Fra Angelico’s Nativity) emerge from wrinkled fabric that shifts colors as it moves through the painting. Mary and Joseph pay homage to an image of a black and white pixelated rabbit eating from a dish in front of the television. The painting as visual pun asks viewers if they prefer cable or dish; the question leads to several layers of speculation rather than to a simple or obvious answer.

The Through the Veil series alludes to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, filtered through a kind of ubi sunt (a feeling of loss or of valuing things or times lost). Through the Veil challenges and plays with memento mori and carpe diem versions of itself. The product lies on the crease of representation and abstraction and conceptualizes and dissolves boundaries, folding, refolding, and unfolding a fabric of interchangeability.