Artist's Statement (Polar)

1. Landscape painting used to picture an experience of the sublime. It was a way to locate yourself: this is you, this is your place, this is how that place brings you the universe. The locale may be violent, tempestuous, dramatic; but your idea of it, your relationship to it, stays direct and therefore stable. Though it may swallow you whole, though it may terrify and awe you, though you may dissolve into it, it does not dissolve. It is comforting and trustworthy in that respect; whatever you do, you will not affect it.

Landscape is not where it used to be. Place is constructed; experience is mediated. Land itself - sites, out in the world - are changing much faster than the time span of eons. The environment moves at the pace of photographs, of video, of data - but it doesn't necessarily move in one direction. Time, surface, media, image melt into each other, creating the space that exists in painting.

My work uses imagery of the North to picture instability. It uses blankness, stillness, omission, and surface to envision the sublime as a quickened process of entropy. This is a formerly monumental ideal turned fragile, stuck in a moment of perpetual dissolution.

2. If I were in the North, that is to say (1) the North where there is always snow higher than my head and only a horizon line to keep it company, or (2) the warming North, where a last stranded polar bear looks forlornly out to sea in search of rescue from global activists, or (3) the scientific North, a land that exists only to measure itself and thereby serve as a cross-cultural locus of international truth, or (4) the Canadian North, where Lawren Harris paints monuments to the Great White Nation while Nanuk carefully hides his cigarettes off-camera and the rest of the population cheers from the southern sideline, or (5) the Modern North, where Barnett Newmann looks for 360 degrees of purity on the other side of Frederic Church's icebergs and Robert Smithson waits for nothing to happen, I would be more nervous about melting.