LOST / FOUND
acrylic paint, oil paint, paint marker, oil
crayons on wood panel | 4 ft x 4 ft | 2024
this project is a collaboration with my friend, fish, that we made for our intermediate painting class at msu denver in the fall of 2024 -- it was so fun + such an honor to work someone who is both a good friend + mentor to me. our artist statement is below:
as students we are rarely encouraged to work together, to share in the collective knowledge and experience of our peers. as we have moved through our education, we have found common ground in a diverse set of experiences and attitudes towards life as artists and as humans, and decided to take this opportunity to speak, think, and create together.
for these pieces, we were inspired by the work of ed ruscha, jasper johns, and math bass -- specifically each of their unique uses of shape, texture, and text. we constructed a pair of paintings that uses complex layers of words and texture, with bold abstract forms that resemble letter shapes to serve as a focal point that the rest of the work emanates from and around.
these pieces function as a conversation about the deconstruction of home and safety, highlighting in particular the nature of fatherhood as legacy and lived experience.
this work is centered around a birdhouse - a glyph for home as both a place of safety and fear; as both a instructive and destructive force. surrounding the deconstructed birdhouse, we created our own visual languge where each image represents a piece of one of our stories and recollections about our fathers and their impact on us.
as we created this piece, we spoke about our own histories with our fathers and, although we have very different experiences we found connection through the ways that each patriarch shaped us as individuals. we discovered that, although our experiences were differernt, the way were both were shaped by those experiences was much more congruent than we originally believed. we express this through our own unique visual literacy that weaves our narratives together, and represents our shared values as humans, friends + artists.