Oil on canvas, 60 x 70 in. with variable depth.
Allowing the canvas to behave like fabric.
A poster of the painting, included in an group exhibition titled “Soledad” in the streets of CDMX, presented by PRMX - PGMX. While indoor gallery spaces were shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, this gallery brought art to the public, wheatpasting posters along the streets for an “art walk.”
Oil on canvas with additions of painted silk, photographic print on canvas, fabric, thread, glow-in-the-dark paint, and dropcloth, 60 x 70 in.
Statement:
Fold, cut, stitch, stretch has been a line of inquiry. It began as a way to image the embodied sense of being material and integrated with the environment. The visual and, of course, philosophical challenge is delineating some degree of separation from physical surroundings and self. With blurry boundaries at the crux, skin and fabric become proxies for one another. The covering folds of bedsheets and the layers of images composited together to build the filmy source photo for the painting both find affinity with pigment layered on canvas.
This work has been shown in multiple contexts during the pandemic, all at a remove: in a virtual show, to be viewed on a screen, and as an image wheatpasted in a street in Mexico City in an effort to bring art to people while galleries were shut down. Both are proxies for encountering the physical painting. They are no less actual, but there is a loss nonetheless. The painting prompted further questions about loss and connection. There was only one compelling workaround for the painting being viewed at a distance: sending it into hands. Craving contact was of course at the fore, and I wanted it for my painting. I cut it into pieces, and sent those pieces to a group of artists. I invited them to a Zoom meeting where, all holding up the pieces to the screen, we recomposed the painting in chance arrangement, ordered by entry into the Zoom room. I asked that the artists return the pieces, or a piece of their own instead of mine. They were invited to alter the piece. One piece was lost in the mail. The messy nature of participation and reciprocity opened contingencies.
After receiving the pieces back, I began stitching the painting back together and incorporating materials sent by the artists. The stitches, like sutures, evidence the history of exchange, and bind contributions to the form in an additive process. The painting flirts with quilting and other traditionally female and handmade practices. Through the process, I have found myself inching closer to a camp of artists who, as painter Amy Sillman observed, “are re-complicating the terrain of gestural, physical, chromatic, embodied, handmade practices.” Moving between composition and construction, the act of painting gave way to folding, cutting, stitching, and stretching of canvas support. Tactility teases out intimacy in and through the work.
Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 x 3/4 in.
Painted atop an older painting from 2017, this image collapses time. The stylized body is imbricated with a former version of itself. This painting gave rise to the “Fold, cut, stitch stretch” project.