Origin

Utilizing imagery from below the earth’s surface as a metaphor for the subconscious; the paintings that make up the Origin series act as iconic representations that never fully reveal themselves. Underground imagery manipulated and transformed through the painting process results in multiple and ambiguous spaces. What starts out in familiar territory ends in the domain of the unfamiliar and the unsettling – in line with Freud’s idea of the uncanny. Dark humour reigns in this series of paintings as a suggested faciality often emerges from the physical warping and mirroring that these underground spaces undergo.

Images from the Origin series operate as both visual sign and physical trigger. Basic structural forms are manipulated in order to create a sense of physical unease: elements are held open, held down, or appear off balance through the pushing and pulling of interior spaces and unsteady round compositions. Imagery originally derived from underground caves, mine tunnels and rail systems, provide a contrast between industrial structure and a more primitive reading that comes from a notion of the underworld as less evolved and archaic. Here, as in many of these visual plays, the opposition of the familiar against the indecipherable; the industrial against the organic struggle toward a formation of meaning shaped by clues both physical and visual.

the gluttonous 2007, oil on canvas, 52″diam

guardian I , 2007, oil on canvas, 52″ diam

guardian II , 2007, oil on canvas, 52″ diam

perfect masters, 2007, oil on canvas, 52″ diam

the indifferent , 2007, oil on canvas, 110″ x 52″ diptych

guardian I & II, 2009 Loop installation with sculpture by Audrea DiJulio

the gluttonous, 2009 Loop installation with sculpture by Audrea DiJulio

the indifferent: double articulation, 2008, screenprint, 22″ x 30″

against oneself: double blind, 2008, screenprint, 22″ x 30″