Upcoming Exhibition

In this new body of work, I am creating from a position of direct connection to the
planet’s oceans as well as research framework centered on interconnected systems, or
hyper-objects. The sea is present among every painting in this exhibition; it is often the
primary focus, but also serves as a backdrop to another moment or event. The paintings echo the rich history of landscape painting from disparate sources such as Gerhard Richter, Caspar David Friedrich, Winslow Homer, Hokusai, J.M.W. Turner, Vija Celmins, Frederic Edwin Church, Inka Essenhigh, and Edvard Munch.

The paintings (primarily oil on linen) allude to sublime moments captured in time. Often at a large scale to capture the immensity of depicted spaces, the paintings utilize a combination of glazing, scumbling, and other indirect painting techniques that interact with the varied linen surfaces. Each painting’s impetus arises from photographic reference material from my 2023 Arctic Circle artist residency aboard the Barkentine sailing vessel, Antigua. Returning to the archipelago of Svalbard, moving about the land and seascapes, and listening to the place, I found the same power, fragility, and ominous warnings that were present on my initial Arctic Circle residency in 2016. Moreover, this research confirmed my interest in painting as a vehicle to connect audiences to our participation, however remote, in the entire planet’s health.

Utilizing the sea as a site that is literally connecting the entire globe with its fluid, shifting state allowed me to expand the focus outside of the polar regions and into our everyday experience. As we spend more time within a truly globally connected world, further understanding the globe as a hyper-object can help inform future personal decisions, governmental policies, and even our romantic tendencies toward the natural world. The work found in this exhibition is the opening salvo of that dialogue.