In my mixed-media paintings, I use stenciling techniques to layer silhouetted botanical patterns over dense backgrounds of floral imagery that have been obsessively duplicated and repeated in visual stutters. Films of translucent paint selectively conceal and reveal conglomerations of plant life, creating windows or portals that symbolize entry points into a psychological realm.
My work borrows imagery from 17th-century Dutch still-lifes. These paintings famously depict a variety of plants that were carefully cultivated and produced, often including flowers of rare coloration or multiple species that would bloom in different seasons, presenting a fantastical view of our natural world. However, even within this fantasy, the Dutch paintings include wilting blooms, bugs consuming leaves, and vases positioned on crumbling plinths to symbolize that all things are fleeting. My work exaggerates and remixes elements from these paintings to a fanatic degree. Petals droop into a cascading waterfall of duplicate images of the same flower as a bumblebee buzzes between five iterations of a reappearing lily. These vibrating gardens, which can only reside within our psyche, manipulate and abolish our linear understanding of time. Through intense attention to detail, saturated colors, and a hyper level of repetition, my work questions how time and perception works. Does our existence operate at the same speed as everything else around us? How does time move between waking life and dream life? And what can we learn from meditating on these intricacies of time?
I propose to exhibit a selection of my large mixed media paintings in Michigan Medicine’s University Hospital Main Lobby 2d Gallery. This group of artworks, which present exploding Rorschach-like abstractions and tangled gardens, consider, within the context of the ideas of time discussed above, the power of meditative looking and how changes emerge through repetition. My work presents an escape from our immediate environment, and I believe art and thoughtfulness provides great potential for healing. Not all the artworks I have included in this application will fit in this space. Six to seven of my large pieces (each measuring 48 x 48 inches or larger) would fill the gallery space nicely, and the works I have in mind appear first in the submitted work samples. However, I have included images of additional, similar works to provide more context and fulfill the application requirements.