Statement
The Clay Projects, New York, 17 October 2007
"Late one evening in January of this year, I found myself watching the city from the window of a speeding taxi. I saw the million passing colors of the urban landscape compress into a single vision, framed by the deep night sky and a darkly patinated Ford interior. It was an image of wholeness, composed of limitless retinal possibilities.
"Over the past several years, I have been working with pre-existing color palettes, harvesting component colors for my images from found materials, often from the city's garbage. Rather than working directly with those materials, this series draws from a complete visual experience, and marks a return for me to the use of paint. These paintings do not seek to simulate specific colors, but to establish a set of parameters that includes them all.
"These paintings seek a palette that extends beyond a caricature of color, and like an image of the passing city, form an essay on what it is like to have eyes in the world."
Central Utah Arts Center, 10 February 2006
"Imagine two people sitting across a table from each other. One slides an object across the table to the other, presenting it for the other's appraisal. Words, if spoken, are unnecessary, "Look at this," or, "Hey, this is worth looking at." To me, this is the basic human interaction that we call visual art.
"I think my job as an artist is to make personal endorsements, take a stand for something, and attach my name to the declaration of significance for an object. In this way, my work is an exercise, and a celebration, of individual responsibility.
"Part of living in New York City is that I do a lot of walking. As a visual person, I also do a lot of looking and a lot of what I see is garbage. Cardboard is not beautiful to me, and whatever cardboard means, the efficiency it embodies, the purposes that it serves, is not really transcendent to me. What is meaningful to me is the idea that someone can take a piece of cardboard and through the application of their own energy and by putting their own name behind it, can make it into something that is interesting to look at."