Statement


The figures are dream-like in a psychological landscape, reflecting a state of reaction to an environment that is full yet ambiguous. My use of color is a significant tool, as I use it to manipulate the heat and energy emanating and circulating within the work. The work is urgent. The bodies are self-reflective and self-aware, constructed from memories of my own body, of my own inspection and consequent bias. The complex relationship, the clash, between body and inner self exists no matter the type of shape we exist in. The disjunction lies in the forward slash in “inner / outer”. What is it, to be between states for all perpetuity? What does the ontological paradox that we are born into feel like? What is skin, what is the thinnest yet most infinite of membranes?

I also take deliberate steps to ground the figures within a landscape, to create a tactile relationship between the body and the ground it lives in. Land and provenance are ideas that interest me a lot: it is, quite literally, the base of our identity. Where we come from, the aspect of climate, and the physical characteristics of a place, are deeply embedded in the ways that we move through the world. As a Californian, the meanings of home, the desert, and the orange, are intermingled.






Mark