Statement from apartment exhibition

I walk across the South Street Bridge at least twice every day to get to work and back home. I am bombarded with graffiti, billboards, cars, porn, trains, posters, stickers, horns, poems, highway. Halfway across the bridge, in the middle of this chaos, the word “LISTEN” is spray painted on the sidewalk. In pink letters. Every day I am reminded to listen, not to the commotion, but to the story that my paintings tell me back in the quiet of my home.
According to the artist Kiki Smith, listening “is what making art is all about.” Painting out of my apartment for the last eight months after moving to Philadelphia has given me the opportunity to focus on process, and to work on a more intimate level with my paintings, which I believe is the story they are telling me.
My bedroom floor is littered with virtually every color swatch that Home Depot offers. I try to find color combinations that our eyes are not used to seeing. When I see two or three colors together that interest me, I rustle through the pile on my floor to find the exact hue and value, or I mix my own color and paint a block, and tape them to my wall together. Color blocks have taken over my room, so that every aspect of my life is inundated with them: getting dressed, eating, taking a nap. It is unlikely to find these color combinations in advertisements, or fashion, or kitchen tiles. Seeing certain colors together can have a jarring effect, be rather unpleasant, and take us off guard. But in turn these combinations are refreshing and provoking, becoming visually engaging, and I enjoy the challenge of incorporating them into my work.
Repetition is also integral to my process. I draw the same shapes over and over again, but with each repetition I allow the natural flaws of the hand and the eye to become exaggerated. By periodically stepping back and looking at what I have made, I overcome the urge to smooth and cover up mistakes or unplanned moments. This slower pace allows me to hear the subtle areas of disorder that my hand has created, through imperfect drawing and experimentation of the medium. I am not trying to create exact duplicates of the previous image, but the shapes become dynamic characters as they metamorphose from one piece to the next. I am not depicting real places or real beings, but instead am moving between control and awkwardness of the medium, hoping to discover a new world somewhere in the middle. It exists as a reality, telling its story through the push and pull between medium and space.
Absorbing the sounds and stimulations of the world outside my home is now a part of my daily routine, just as sleeping amongst color blocks is routine. Seeing the word “LISTEN,” reminds me there is another world within my paintings I can always return to, as long as I am willing to pay attention.