Remember Reflect Reform

I’ve been a bit busy lately working through my first semester in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The past few months I read several books and spent man-hours in the studio. The work is almost ready to be packed and shipped to VT residency.

In this work, I have been exploring phenomena of memory augmentation. I experimented with reflections and cinematic images by juxtaposing photographs, paint, wood, and mylar. The direction of the work includes painting intimate, reflective, observations of augmented memories. 

I began by building a cabinet of curiosities as a way to form a tableau painting and experiment with different media. Inspired by the relief paintings by artist Sally Han, I built a model of a Victorian cabinet using tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution. I painted on a variety of surfaces including wood, photographs, and adding raw lumber to the pieces. In this process, I disassembled the cabinet to give autonomy to each piece. Although I diverted from the original idea of a final installation, there was an impulse to paint larger. Adding mylar was yet another way to accentuate reflection as a part of the critical dialogue with the work. The final result offers an opportunity to remember, reflect, and reform.