Earlier in the call, you referred to this as your “mental museum”. What did you mean by that?
I notice I say things without even thinking about it. I have this language with my art, and the paintings are a dialect of this language that I’ve been trying to make up in this searching. And the language is the instructions of how to search for something.
Have you ever sat in the tub and pushed water with your hands and seen it bounce and dribble? I don’t know how old you are, but I love just sitting in the tub.
I don’t have a tub, unfortunately, so I don’t get to do that a lot.
Yeah, but you know what I’m talking about.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.
Yeah, so that’s what I'm doing with smoke. And I’m doing it sideways, and in the dark. I’m trying to draw with a cloud for no reason. That’s what’s happening here in this mental museum. I’ve always been interested in different ways of making marks without paint. I joked around with my pals about being “the paintless painter”. A majority of my work is leaving marks and impressions of some sort.
I’m always trying to do something that makes somebody go “huh?” and then “wow!”
I definitely think you achieved that with this installation. It looks amazing.
Thank you so much, that means a lot. Even though the pieces come from a personal place, the art comes from a universal set of ideas from fresco paintings. But they also come from a present-day space. I grew up in New York and I remember seeing candle residue on ceilings and not knowing where that came from. Then getting older and finding out what that was like, oh, it was from fire.
A Day's Work is up through March 10th at Foreign & Domestic.