• Media Screen prints and charcoal rubbings on dyed canvas
• Size 48 x 34 inches
• Year 2021

Info: After a year spent safe but mostly locked down, I started this work at the beginning of 2021 with a simple idea: to make new pieces by remixing my old pieces. More specifically, I have been screen printing for fifteen years, and I wanted to create a new series of large-scale abstract works by remixing the incredible variety of screens and transparency masks from my personal archive. All of the marks on these pieces are made by what I describe as freestyle screen printing, iteratively layering hundreds of hand-pulled prints through mesh screens directly on to the canvas. I think of this technique as a painterly approach to printmaking, emphasizing gesture, spontaneity, and materiality. Up close, the surfaces provide the viewer with an absorbing topography of details, patterns, optical tricks and retinal delights. What are the aesthetic possibilities of a mechanical process that works like a copying machine?

To me this new work is personally transformative because it starts with physical artifacts from my history (“fossils”), and uses them as a generative source for creating something new and unexpected: exuberant, dense collages that connect such contrasting sources as illustrations from my childhood edition of Joy of Cooking to customer satisfaction surveys to microscopic halftone patterns enlarged 100x. As a human, the pandemic forced me to reconsider the relationship between the past and the future. As an artist, the pandemic compelled me to reconfigure them.

Broadly speaking, the works fit into two buckets:
Explosions: Maximalist, Dense, Kinetic.
Gradients: Minimalist, Meditative, Pacific.