Pretty Color Time

“Pretty Color Time” is the language that underscores my intertwined practices of painting, printmaking, collage, and theoretical study over the past year and several months. It is a culmination of three years of work rendering landscapes with particular regard for color, joy, anxiety, sexuality, and the horizon as a stratum of impermanence regarding spectral light, the essence of phenomena, and notions of a queer utopia that are forever receding. In describing the theoretical mythos of my work, I have chosen to make thoroughgoing investigations of queer theory, sublime theory, Buddhist emptiness theory, Lacanian semiotics of anxiety and desire, and the methodologies and meanings underlying the works of artists whose work I revere. I have also conducted direct interviews with Queens, NY based painter Caroline Wells Chandler (b.1985). My interviews with Caroline have proved an invaluable resource in both formulation of and motivation for my work. The work I make fixates on simultaneity; my paintings of sublime phenomena articulate manic energy as surrounding oscillations between binary fixed points. This occurs through great attention to detail in the description of abstract spaces taken as portals, or emanating an inner light, most often as horizons. In both instances, the call is to the journey, of traveling space where immediacy seems to replace time, forward is the movement, and change is a constant. I believe this space is unbound and infinite, allowing the simultaneity of what Chandler calls the “Third Layer” to arise outside of normative time – in between gender and sexuality – in a realm of embodiment that is given to creativity and the cultivation of, or even hunger for, adaptation. This idea is underscored and even mirrored by Buddhist emptiness, and the Object-Oriented Ontology construct of the Hyperobject. My findings affirm my life, work, and the professional community I am building for myself in the creative world. Through the process of matriculation I have engendered a practice of art making I believe will lead me through life as a benevolent seeker.