READY TO SEe

selected works

Displacement, grief, and renewal mark and inform this series of paintings. Embedded in each composition are sampled fragments of drawings done by artist Loren Baker, a close friend who, at the time this series was made, had recently taken his life. The sampled drawings were the last works he made in the weeks before his death. My strategy was to use these fragments of visual disclosure as compositional prompts to mourn and celebrate our friendship.

Derived from evolving processes, layer upon layer, process on top of process, the surfaces of these paintings are labored and the colors richly saturated. Each work archives conversations between process and material, structure and concept, Loren and myself, moving toward completion, like a palimpsest. Not all of the conversations comprising the paintings are therefore available to the viewer. Some are obscured completely. But the paintings are indeed “Ready to See”: An invitation to attend to and be changed by what is particular in any given process- and relationship-derived surface. These paintings express both grief and gratitude.

A poem by Katelyn Skye Seitz:

Practice your resurrection
Taste the rotation of your untwisting.
Never settle for high lofty places.
When redemption is in the dirt and the spit.
Feel the promise of wholeness
Play hide and seek in between your muscles and bones.
Wear your skin like it is My story you have to tell.
And tell it well.
Turns out death is not your size, child.
You will outgrow it.