Statement and guide to works

A Caveat about Artists' Statements

What I am Working on Now

CV

The Worst Possible Illusion

 

 

What I am Working on Now































Disastrous Vessels

Sputnik Launch Tower

A planned set of paintings, now underway, of cardboard maquettes of vehicles of massive hubris and monumental disasters, each doomed in their own way, done partly in dialogue with the work of William Daniels. Vehicles include:

  • The Hindenberg
  • The Titanic
  • Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
  • The Challenger Space Shuttle
  • The Ryugyong Hotel
  • The V2
  • Sputnik-2
  • The Lobotomobile

Chicken Shovel 2.0

I am slowly working on the next stage for my dissertation, The Chicken Shovel Phenomena, with an eye towards producing videos or slideshows based on my research.

[No title]

A new novel which is growing out of where I find myself, literally and figuratively, after What’s Wrong With You

Related ventures

CRATES

A system for organizing, sharing, and embedding online content, geared towards artists and writers. This site currently runs an alpha version of CRATES.

Research Club

Salon-style dinners, field trips and events, associated clubs, and a group blog meant to foster connections among Portland’s art community.

Statement and Guide to Works

I have always found the failures of communication to be tragic and captivating. I feel slightly dishonest phrasing it so academically, but I’ve come to understand more and more of my practice through the lens of my severe synesthesia. In one way or another, translation, sensory dissonance, and the fraught effort to describe one’s own experience have occupied me for most of my life, informing almost all of my work.

Please see "The Worst Possible Illusion" for more.

All the works below can also be found in my online portfolio: flash / html

A list of past works

Listed newest to oldest, annotated in regard to these ideas.

The Man of Steel

Man of Steel

Paintings from photos of a handmade wooden Superman doll inspired by William Daniels' powerful paintings of assemblages of inferior, surrogate materials which reference grand, powerful, or sublime works. Superman, as an image, is nearly arbitrary and repurposed to such a degree as to be conceptually faceless. A shortcut to connect stories to the desire for freedom, dominance, drama, and power, in all his forms he is a flawed device full of hubris. My maquette and the way I have painted it linger at the threshold where the illusion of this power and desire fades into an awareness of that illusion, the impossibility of capturing it, and the hubris of trying. Note: My work on this series was interrupted by the events that led to me leaving Scotland. I plan to resume it soon. View Gallery

What's Wrong With You

Six stories, published in a hand-bound edition with letterpress and block-print covers. Each story explores, from different approaches, the gulf between personal experience and reality, the hazards of trying to cross that gulf, the stubbornness that produces and later emerges to address that gulf, and the occasional impossibility of communication. Read one of the stories.

Wish You Were Here

Detail from Standin on a Mountain Looking at Another Mountain

Uncanny or interrupted landscapes painted from photos I’ve taken over the last decade, each trying in one way or another to touch or access the space or moment that I witnessed but could not enter. These are attempt to capture the place and time of both the original photo and of the process of painting with the full knowledge that the attempt will fail. The trace of the sublime which I remember from the moment remains as a punctum in the photograph, and my attempts to paint such a thing rely on, in James Elkins’ terms, beleaguered magic, the worst possible illusion, and the obvious insufficiency of the paint. View Gallery

The Reliable Metaphysics of Everyday Life

Sculpture - My Dreamgirl Don't Exist

After losing my faith in photorealism, I didn’t get anywhere new until I eventually began making work from garbage I found in my neighborhood in Glasgow after a student was murdered at my front door.
   I was too exasperated to deny my surroundings, but desperate to rise above them. Engaging with the trash that lined the streets became a way to speak not only about my context, but my effort to speak in that context. What I meant to say and the effort to say it became inseparable from the specific contingency of every aspect of the media I used -- its texture, history, my choice and manipulation of it. Each of my sculptures emphasized, in some way, their own transformation while also admitting the inescapable facts of their history and substance.
  This relationship between vision, expression, process and material is strongest and fastest in the eyes. We decide, almost instantly, what we see, what we think we see, what it means, and how it got there. The interesting parts of vision lie in the cracks between these steps, rather than in exotic or intricate destinations. Most of my work is now concerned with those cracks. View gallery

Dabbling With Photorealism

Detailed studies and photorealism seduced me with their promise of objectivity and greedy verisimilitude for a while.

Novel - Young People Living In Rented Rooms

I only completed one major photorealistic work, a novel. It recorded, in oppressive detail, the time and place I sought to capture, but the things it failed to communicate seemed even more significant for the force of all the words that had tried and failed. Read Samples

This Map Only Shows the Stops and Stations

Artists’ statements are meant to answer the question “what does this artist do?” However, if they answer any questions or communicate anything at all, they usually only describe the most common aspects of the work that the artist wants to talk about. They exist mainly for viewers who either haven’t decided if the work is worth their time or those who aren’t sure what to say about it, so for those purposes a summary is appropriate. For almost all other purposes, including the attempt to communicate what an artist does, the contemporary artist's statement is nearly pointless. If an artist is worth your time, he or she will spend a great deal of his or her time doubting, being curious, or being surprised. The time and pedantry required to keep an artist’s statement current with such a process and what it produces would be monumental and draining. Unless the artist his or herself is brainwashed, which many are, artists' statements can only be approximations. At their best, they say what interests the artist most, and how they usually work. This is certainly useful information, but only when one stays aware of its limitations. Read statements with the work in mind, not the other way round.

Artists’ statements, like the law and bad art, skew towards what is easiest to put into words. For this reason, they are usually more about concepts than aesthetics, as we have a poorer vocabulary for looking than we do for thinking. As demonstrated by the impossible instruction, “Don’t think of white elephants”, things said are stronger than things unsaid. So it is tempting to say nothing to either side, to present the work and be done with it. The problem is that, while single works may stand on their own, they do not answer the whole question “what does this artist do”, unless the are by a boring artist. It is a terrible habit to expect individual pieces to be as summary and compliant with an artists statement as a billboard is with a brand name. That sort of thing should not be encouraged. Worse still is the sloppy habit of understanding the division of concept from aesthetics yet accepting one as a replacement for the other. This statement is my attempt to summarize the common threads which connect the sometimes disparate areas of my work, to describe my approach to different disciplines, and to introduce some of the things that fascinate me. Like everything else on this site, it is in-progress

CV

Education

Glasgow School of Art, 2008 - Ba(Hons)

Exhibitions

Place 03 - Pastoral
Glasgow, Scotland
July 2008

Young Contemporary Artists
Glasgow, Scotland
July 11 - September 4th, 2008

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show
Glasgow, Scotland
June 12-21, 2008

Glasgow International 2008
Glasgow, Scotland
April 11-27, 2008
Two-person show

Royal Scottish Academy
Edinburgh, Scotland
32nd Annual RSA Student Exhibition
February 16, 2008

OFCOM Annual Event
London, England
February 4, 2008

New Work by Ním Wunnan
Victoria Union
Glasgow, Scotland
Solo Show
March 6, 2007

Panopticon Group Show
Panopticon Theatre, Trongate, Glasgow
April 18-23 2006

Publications

Cross Section
Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art
April 2008

Awards and Residencies

Visual Studies Workshop Book Arts Residency
Rochester, NY
Autumn Season, 2005 Awarded but did not attend

The Worst Possible Illusion

This term comes from artist Vik Muniz. In James Elkins’ essay on contemporary artist Vik Muniz, The Most Interesting Thing that Can be Done with Representation, Elkins writes "...provisionally, representation is at its most interesting when it playfully demonstrates its insufficiency, in a particular manner which is related to magic, and in a mode that can be described as rudimentary or simple."

He adds four terms to a list of strategies for interesting representation (as introduced by cubism) which he has identified in Muniz’s work.

“

8. Magic... The new magic is beleaguered: beset by carefully plotted evidence of its own impossibility, and teased by its own continued existence in pictures.

9. Illusionism "demonstrates its insufficiency,”... The best contemporary pictures... can be "fiercely committed" to denying their insufficiency, but in the end the denial cannot be deferred.

10. The "worst possible illusion" that Muniz mentions is actually the best possible illusion, the one where the image's possibilities are shown as the ruins that they have become...

He places special emphasis on his final point (11) “Contingency,” and identifies a “rigorous contingency” in Muniz’s work, saying that “ it remains fixed to the point of representation, to the material and strategy of the moment, in order to say the most interesting thing about representation that it is possible to say at each moment.”

These points reflect the eventual logic of the accumulation of choices that led to subject and style of my paintings. The hazards of communicating a “rigorous contingency” have preoccupied me for many years.