Borrowed Expressions
I believe that making art is a form of research in which you can “think” with your feelings, and that you can learn from this process. Sometimes, though, this possibility of knowledge seems to elude me and I find myself moving down blind alleys and putting paint on paper in a mindless, repetitious manner. When this happens, I look to other artists for information and a way to produce a more accurate reading of what is going on in my world. I borrow their expressive abilities, sometimes in a direct, literal manner, and sometimes in a more circuitous way and with tongue firmly in cheek.
This show includes a series of watercolors that reproduce, in miniature, work by artists (painters, photographers, filmmakers…) that I borrowed in an attempt to express a specific mood or emotional state. The larger mixed media works on paper combine drawings from various artists (Joseph Beuys, Philip Guston, Egon Schiele and others). I use their efforts as the framework for an imagined conversation with my art-making partners.
Unlike earlier efforts by artists like Sherrie Levine, whose purpose in appropriating work by other artists was to questions notions of originality and authorship, my quest is to find a way to express my emotional state in whatever way possible. If I can’t directly express joy within my usual approach, why not use Emmet Gowin’s photograph to do it for me? I reach out to art images in the same way someone else might turn to specific songs to heighten or indulge their mood. For better or worse, I have always lived in the art world, therefore reading my life through the lens of art is perfectly natural to me.
