Dream Places
"I love his pictures; they look like a cartographer trying to approximate a dream." --Hilton Als, White Girls
Dream Places begins with a conversation between me and another person, often a stranger:
Do you have a place you repeatedly go to in your dreams? Could you describe it to me? I’ll attempt to make a painting of your dream place.
Prior to this project, I’d been working in an improvised manner, trying to feel less stuck or bored by the limits of my own way of seeing things, often depicting an “objectively" shared, rational world in my paintings. As the external elements of my own life became more predictable, the desire emerged to make "weirder" work, paintings that explore inner visions as a source of personal truth and authenticity.
Sophie Calle’s projects surrounding vision also became a touchstone: how the blind understand the visible world, the challenge and impossibility of envisioning things that are impossible or improbable to see, grasp or understand within a rational, objective system. I wanted the challenge of painting something that is not physically present in this world, that is fleeting and ephemeral, leaving little trace but a lingering aftertaste.
Given that all imagery in Dream Places is derived from the dreamer’s descriptions, the process of translation is the primary point of departure. Centering subjectivity and human-to-human interaction, the resulting paintings are a document of the attempt to connect, listen, understand, interpret and visually translate the ineffable and tenuous experience of dreaming into something concrete and lasting.
