Girl Dreaming

There's no fog in my dreams. What had seemed dead jolts alive now, electrifying.

When I was younger I chased the figure, to mold it onto the canvas. But the aura needs so little to take hold of a surface. In the stroke where I stripped the eyes from the figure, it became destroyed (not the form, but itself) as something first built and then demolished. The wreckage is still a figure, albeit as stripped as it was never fully created. I made sure the essentials remained, but an aura needs no eyes, in the wake of expressionistic landscapes (where the mental and physical burst into each other like that kaleidoscopic scrape), not anymore. She is more canvas than she is paint, a figure behind the "figures" of color, yet simultaneously wrenched to the forefront as a whole. I don't think seeing her lends more order to the descriptions of depth, but rather complicates them more.

Ammunition

Acrylic

Sabi

Scars are the healed forms of intrusion (or extrusion). The visible realization of interactions with our imperfect bodies, both masking and indicating the memory of violence (the act of living). This is the inevitable progress of skin/body.

Scars look just like scorch marks. They reach up like roots, caressing like constellations. I was stumbling in delirium, laying down paint with my fingers. This time the canvas burned. The wax dripped through it. Oil, acrylic, lavender/eucalyptus/cantaloupe-scented wax, dryer sheets, cotton fabric, metal chain.

Detail shots here.

Sabi panel 1

Sabi panel 2

Sabi panel 3

Sabi panel 4

Sabi panel 5

Sabi panel 6

Sabi panel 7

Sabi panel 8

Sabi panel 9

Untitled

Devastating is that which is just short of fatal.

How can trauma be encoded? I lose the memory in translation, its representation altered to the point of erasure. To attempt to depict is to override. Oil, eucalyptus-scented wax.

Stain

I wanted to reignite something, so I put my lighter to the canvas (It didn't burn). No orientation. Oil, lavender-scented wax, acrylic ink, wine.

K

The more I attempted to find the memory of that experience, the more I realized that linguistic and visual descriptors have tainted it irreparably by now. Pink in my unconscious, long gone now, pink in my marker doodles, which we continue to perpetuate (especially through disavowal) as a signifier of outdated femininity.

1. They ask me to rate my pain. I think about period cramps. 2. A female surgeon looks down at me, says, "If you were a man, you'd be screaming bloody murder by now." 3. I hallucinate pink. 4. A man screams next to me, on and on and on. 5. I paint pink with AbEx aggression.

Acrylic, black lava medium, acrylic ink.

Trapps Boulders

The Gunks, Scratchboard

Base of Kaaterskill Falls, Catskills

Platte Clove Artist-in-Residency

Artists' Rock, Catskills

Platte Clove Artist-in-Residency

Crash

Mountains with Eyes

Up/down orientation.

From the Village with the Old River-powered Mill

China Series

My father travels to experience an unknown China, far from the crowded cities and Mandarin Chinese. Deep in these mountains, his camera shows me the minority cultures which speak to his roots. He doesn't shoot like a tourist, but like someone who left a village longing to return, even as he watches high rises spring in multitudes from the now paved ground of his beloved hometown.