Objectified

My art practice has always centered on paint, but experimentation has played a part, too. Five years ago, I left canvas behind and began to experiment with using paint to make self-contained objects. These works are the latest results of that particular experiment.

Several of the new works reference my father, who died this year. Stack of Planks, for instance, like the other simulations of wood and wood products, is a descendant of the rudimentary constructions that I put together in my dad’s woodshop as a child, the kind of thing that would start with a foot-long board, which then became the hull of an ocean liner, with smaller pieces of wood nailed on top to represent the upper decks and the smokestacks. And lately I’ve been finding it cathartic to use purple, the favorite color of my mom, who now seems to be slipping away. It’s not that I’ve consciously created monuments to my parents. It’s more that particular objects I’ve made bring my mom and my dad to mind.

Maybe it’s because each of the Paint Objects begins life as a paint skin, when gallons and gallons of acrylic are poured right out onto the studio floor—an extravagance that flies in the face of my parents’ lifelong frugality and practicality. So who’s to say it’s not their sensed disapproval that drives me to honor their waste-not, want-not ways by recycling leftover bits and pieces, and reusing parts of earlier works to create new ones? That’s what happened when some acrylic “waferboard” panels eventually came back to my studio from a site-specific installation. By the time I saw them again, they looked to me like raw material, so they became the grounds for new paintings. And when I was working with a water jet to “mill” “planks” from acrylic “logs,” I saw my opportunity to slice off the thin “veneers” that became Paneling, Light and Paneling, Dark, which mimic the knotty-pine walls in the playroom of my childhood home—and, not incidentally, recall Frank Stella’s stripe paintings.

For of course no body of work is purely personal. Inevitably layered with personal history, it also has connections with art history. In the case of the Paint Objects—simulacra of building products that experiment with paint’s materiality, render the conventions of minimalism in three-dimensional painted form, push paint into the domain of sculpture, nod to the ready-made, and use nonmimetic color to highlight their own artificiality—the obvious connections are not just with Stella’s paintings but also with the work of Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Lynda Benglis. But these objects’ indebtedness to earlier artists is only one of their collective dimensions. Another is their evocation, however oblique, of the natural world’s ravaged state.

As for the Pulls, the first one came about by accident. I had just poured the skin for one of my “wood” blocks when a sheet of paper fluttered down onto the paint. I pulled the sheet off the wet acrylic, turned it over, and immediately understood that I had stumbled upon a new way of working.

But that’s not all. This very accident is what finally made it impossible to continue turning a utilitarian eye to the lush, gorgeous, multicolored surface of all that poured paint. And now the paint skins, refusing their status as raw material, have been demanding recognition, too, but not just as objects in their own right. No. What they want now—specifically, unnervingly, heretically, in defiance of everything I learned in art school—is to be recognized as beautiful objects. That’s how Hidden/Exposed, originally a skin poured for Stack of Planks, escaped its fate.

So now the insurrection is on, and I feel my work being drawn in unfamiliar directions, toward regions more intuited than discerned, unknown territories that are stirring up curiosity and anxiety in me, in equal measure.


             
             
Photos: Richard Nicol