This has been a busy year with new work appearing in quite a few group shows, my third solo show, and three residencies over the course of 2017.
I started the year at The Studios at Mass MoCA, an artist residency where I made three of the paintings included in In Raptures (more on that below), another one that appeared in Art Speaks, a group show in Providence at The Wurks, and developed a special project that I showed at CAA's ArtExchange in New York in February. Most of these pieces were a continuation of painting experiments I began in 2016, such as The Witnesses. I started as a painter and have been rediscovering how to paint with a very sculptural attention to materials and process. This started out as a brief digression but has continued to fascinate me, so I’ve decided to just roll with it for a while.
I also participated in the inaugural Summer Art Residency at CalArts. It was insightful and inspiring to spend time there and see what makes that place — and especially its artists — tick. One of the pieces I made there, a diptych called (An Inscription of) Relays, Etheric and Instinctive wound up in The Gallery at BRIC House’s exhibition Truth, and another piece, this time a sculpture, called Reflexive Architectures, was also included in In Raptures.
I ended the Summer at the peaceful and bucolic Catwalk Institute, in Catskill NY, where I worked on new ideas and processes for upcoming projects (more on that in 2018). Bushwick Open Studios gave me a chance to preview some of this work to over 400 visitors that came through my doors over that weekend.
The highlight was In Raptures, my third solo exhibition, which took place in December at Rhode Island College’s Chazan Family Gallery. It brought together a year of new work on a subject I’ve been researching since early 2016: specifically, as the irrational has become increasingly present in every day life, how are we to deal with and understand this human impulse towards the irrational? As much work was edited out of the show as made it in, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to show some of this work in 2018.
On that note, in January 2018, I will be participating in a show called Post-Earth, curated by Sophia Sobers and taking place at Index Art Center in Newark, NJ. The show is a consideration of environmental concerns under the current erosion of environmental protections and skepticism of scientific data. A difficult subject, but I’m looking forward to this exhibition and have great optimism moving forward in 2018.