Dogged Firmament (Sites of Construction)
2023. Scaffolding with transducers and DayGlo, acrylic, and surf wax on canvas.
Dogged Firmament (Sites of Construction) is an installation with scaffolding and three paintings contained within, on top, or against it–the scaffolding always predicating the arrangement of paintings. Buttress, Column, and Truss are paintings whose stretcher bars undulate in fluid ways, creating the gesture not with brushstroke but in the construction. That gesture emulates the architecture it’s referencing, but in a kinetic (and therefore unstable) whimsical motion. These canvases are color fields of DayGlo fluorescent paint, lightly washed to show brushstroke and layered with non-fluorescing pigmented wax. This stippled wax texture offsets the fluorescents and creates a vibration through optical mixing. Similarly, the audio element, which is resonated through the scaffolding, makes the scaffolding structure vibrate and shake. This jarring sound raises questions about the integrity and safety of the construction of the scaffolding.
This project is a conversation between the unrevealed being seen and the converse: the easily seen being a facade. Through this, I see this project as phenomenological (regarding embodiment) and pneumatological (regarding the spiritual). The progenitor for this project was a cognitive wrestle with spirituality. Most of the discourse around Western religious deconstruction has to do with the utilitarian and cognitive aspects of faith and belief, which is a valid thing to critique–dogmatic religious systems have countless times deployed modes of oppression against minority groups. But not much is chalked to intuition, trust, and surrender to a higher power–aspects that happen partially or completely besides cognition. The tension between cognitive dissonance and an instinctive/somatic sense of something outside of yourself (i.e. awe and wonder) is what I’m leaving the viewer within this project, a wearied, dogged, endeavor at trying to scope out the firmament, scope out something beyond us.
