my artist statement from bklyn show

What is real and what is simulated?

Often, when people think of representational and figurative art, people think of art depicting the real, i.e. a recognizable object and scene. Representational art is usually juxtaposed to its supposed opposite, abstract art, and held up as retaining the strongest reference to the actual world. However, hidden behind this surface understanding of the term representational is its etymology: to represent. To represent something, by definition, is not to be the thing itself.
Most of the paintings within this show incorporate naturally occurring patterns including watermarks, thumbprints, and wood veins. Although each painting is abstract, each incorporates a form of natural reality and not its representation.

What does it mean for something to be natural?

Many philosophers, including Descartes and Plato, separated our perceived physical world from the abstract ideals of the mind. For Plato, geometry is an ideal form because logical tautologies are always true, despite what the physical world presents. In the case of Descartes, the mind is all we can know, because physical externality is always distanced from us by our filtering of perceived sensations. This conceptual separation of the ideal form from the natural still exists today and one such example is the duality of science versus art. Science, it is thought, objectively explains our natural world via empirically observed facts. Art, on the other hand, is thought to be subjective expressionism. But, don’t personal expressions factually occur? Once they are created, are they not empirical? Also, aren’t subjects necessary, at all times, for the contemplation of any ideal form? In other words, what are ideal forms if they are not contemplated by a subject?

My paintings work to defy conceptual dualities regularly accepted by Western culture. Geometric patterns, ideal forms, pictures of physics problems, and math are regularly featured within my work next to poetry, natural patterns, intuitive marks, and happenstance. These supposedly diametric aspects of life weave into one another until the extremes wear away.