I work across the areas of painting, photography and digital media. As a personally constructed system of signs, painting is inherently abstract while photography, an indexical sign left by a trace of light across a film plane, is unavoidably representational. Though such a clear distinction can be made between these mediums, the corresponding realms of representation and abstraction are far from being mutually exclusive. Most attempts to separate them are fiercely partisan.
My work in digital media explores this overlap of representation and abstraction by blurring the line between photography and painting. In the Red Gray Grid series, I use photography to re-present some of the more ephemeral conditions affecting a painting’s reception by a viewer—specifically, lighting, point of view and depth of field and their impact on surface and color. This work makes a maze of representation and abstraction by creating an abstraction—in the form of the print—from composite representations (photographs) of abstractions (paintings). One result is a tension created by the conflation of a physical surface and the surface of its representation.
Cathrine’s Window is an image of a print in the making. Nocturnal shadows cast on a studio wall model not only the process of photographic enlargement but the origins of painting. Unlike the void left by a hand on a cave wall, letter forms project through space forming both volume and image without revealing their origin.
The Blue Plate series is a meditation on the nature and meaning of the digital print in the context of this perplexing network of abstraction, illusion and representation. Probing the nature of surface and light and their role in the formation of images, I photograph zinc intaglio printing plates from a previous project. As an image, a traditional print bears a direct resemblance to the physical matrix from which ink has been transferred to paper. In that sense, it is an iconic sign of the matrix. But a digital print does not result from a matrix. Instead, it is a translation of digital code to which it bears no physical or visual resemblance. So a digital print is more a performance or translation than a transference or reproduction. In this series, the images are distanced from the apparent matrix of the zinc plate through the imposition of photography folding them into the digital realm from which they are translated back to a new surface. They become a recording of the layered act of looking as a means of knowing and knowing what is known.
A common aspect of all of this work is the tendency to give rise to the questions, “What am I looking at, how do I relate to it and how do I understand it?” Such self-reflexive viewing is my goal, as an artist’s role is to remind us of our capacity to wonder.
– May, 2010
