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[Read] Just Opening

In 1972 art historian Hubert Damisch ended a lecture at Cornell saying: 

“We have been formed by millennia of Judeo-Christianity to look at speech as the beginning of all things. This is precisely what we have to question…For we have been trained by centuries of humanistic culture to look at pictures as illustrative, as derived from speech, from literature, from poetry” 

This series of twenty-one oil paintings on canvas uses my dreams as source material in each painting. After, I layered marks based on a reimagined modern English alphabet. This alphabet did not describe the work or to act as a meaningful code. The mark making gestured to the elusiveness of language and difficulty to recreate a dream into language. I liked the tension between the personal pictorial landscapes and the invasion by the oppressive nature of language. When these two planes come together, they clash. Seeing and speaking are at odds. I attempt to reconcile their differences. I provide a space for both experiences of communication. The titles mirror the final pictorial experience in the paintings in font. The series was exhibited at Glass Gallery in Athens, GA in 2022.