All works: 2013
In developing the work for this show, I focused initially on how certain landscapes and subject matter function in a long term continuum of “looking” at things and translating them into a painting. Many of the scenes in the Taft collection are genre scenes - everyday life, depicted beautifully with paint. There’s a kind of humbleness to that approach. I was specifically interested in the mid-nineteenth century collection at the Taft. Connection to the landscape, the power of Nature, and finding solace in both those things is emblematic of the Barbizon school and its less romanticized approach to depicting landscape. While this was my starting point, as I spent more time looking at the collection, I became fascinated with the frames. As ornate windows for landscape, objects of value in and of themselves, the frame focuses your attention and tells you to look at the object of value within it. The problem I set for myself in developing this exhibit became to extend and transmute frame and image into a unified whole. A couple key pieces (Pruina and Clear) in this exhibit clearly reference landscape compositions in the Taft's collection. Most of the works go further afield and relate more to the intense decorative motifs employed in the frames that surround these paintings. The companion sculptural pieces, while decorative or ornate, express the same processes of growth, decay and regeneration implied in the photographs.
Steel, repousse copper
Divide, in foreground
photograph on aluminum, mahogany, cast bronze, ornament, led light
Flutter: photograph, hand finished frame with cast ornament, repousse copper, patina
Foliate: photograph, hand finished frame with cast ornament, welded steel, polychrome, gilding
cast bronze, gilded plaster, polychrome
cast bronze, gilded plaster, polychrome
photograph on aluminum, mahogany, cast bronze, ornament, led light