I am interested in how painted surfaces are able to evoke the most rudimentary experiences of proximity and distance. My paintings explore how these surfaces are as likely to frustrate as to satisfy the viewer's expectations of depth and orientation.

In my paintings, I present highly fugitive surfaces that simultaneously assert and deny their material presence. This is one of the reasons that I often use Plexiglas as a substrate, as it reveals no obvious distinction between the surface and the inner substance of the material. This leads to ambiguous readings of surface and depth. Typically I deploy a limited stock of visual cues and motifs that are randomly distributed and/or clustered across the surfaces. The various marks, pours, blurs, and the physical substrate itself act as placeholders, which I see as loose equivalents to landmarks in a landscape. As the function of a landmark is to orient and to establish a knowable location in real space, so the function of these placeholders would be to register the various levels of surface and depth in pictorial space. Despite their faint echoes of classical spatial organization (fore, middle, and back grounds), these placeholders are subjected to a high level of visual compression where there is little distinction between what seems distant and what appears close at hand.

I want my paintings to emulate what I sense is an intriguing paradox of contemporary experience. The spaces in which we usually operate feel ever more expansive and compressed at the same time. I cannot adequately explain this here, so a simple example will have to suffice. In my childhood in the plains of Montana, the dominant sense of space was expansive pure and simple. However, my occasional forays through contemporary exurbia elicit far more complicated experiences. Despite the considerable distances traversed, a peculiar flattening takes over. This is determined in part by the frequent repetitions of virtually the same placeholders (landmarks), the myriad, look-alike, intensely colored chain stores and gas stations that punctuate the landscape. No matter how far I drive, I never seem to get to a place that feels to be anywhere else.

I admit that my feelings for this state of affairs are highly ambivalent; simultaneously a childlike delight in a maze and the fatigue of perpetual disorientation. It is my ambition that a similar ambivalence inhabits the surfaces of my paintings.