The Archeology of Memory

Rogue Gallery & Art Center | 40 S Bartlett St. | Medford, OR 97501
January 20th through March 3rd, 2023
Reception: January 20th, 2023 5:30–8PM

Traveling Through - 2022

56 x 22 in. ed. 1/1 (unique)

Infinite Float with Mystic Water Creature - 2021

57 x 18 in.  ed. 1/1 (unique)

Collection of Cheryl Latif

Falling - 2022

51 x 23 in. oval  ed. 1/1 (unique)

Cluster From the Depths - 2022

65-1/4 x 28 in. oval ed. 1/1 (unique)

I Will Fight You on the Beaches - 2021

20 x 20 in.  ed. 1/1 (unique)

Collection of Carmen Cisnieros

Russian River - 2022

44-1/4 x 34 in.  ed. 1/1 (unique)

El Greco’s Hand - 2022

51 x 23 in.  ed. 1/1 (unique)

Artist Statement:
The Archeology of Memory

Of what value is the past?  Is it as inconsequential as a fishbone, decomposing on the floor of the Pacific?  Or is the past like Poe’s Telltale Heart, beating just under the floorboards - unseen, yet ever present and powerful?  My artwork is the record of grappling with such mysteries. 

The raw material I use to make these paintings is drawn from the extensive archive of photographic imagery I’ve gathered over the decades.  These visual elements include images of family and friends, museum shows and art catalogs, my travels, screen grabs from television, clips from newspapers, magazines, and the internet, and any of the mundane and curious discards of consumer culture that populate thrift stores.  Essentially, anything that brings me up short, makes an impression, or promises to breathe understanding of the relationship between past to present may find its way into my work.

I also draw from my decades of studio work - pen and ink drawings, woodblock prints, and sculpture from the 1970’s; monoprints and paintings from the 1980’s; text-based computer and photo generated work from the 1990’s - each a memory I can excavate from the past and fold into new work.

Every new piece is distilled from this data vault. 

I spent some years using the traditional tools of painting – brush, paint, canvas – and formulating all the decisions any artist makes about composition, form, and color. Those same decisions exist within Photoshop. But its digital tools also allow me to implement a layering protocol; a way of juxtaposing the visual rubble from my archive to give the images new meaning and intensify their impact. 

This restructured relationship establishes a dialectic - a discourse or conversation - from present to past and back. What did this once mean?  What does it mean now? The Photoshop layering process forms the contemporary equivalent of pentimento, and the net results are unique paintings - narratives of repurposed history - frozen in a two-dimensional format.

Los Angeles-based artist Carter Mull explained the process this way: “Though the raw material utilized in the pieces is ‘photographic’, they are not to be confused with photographs.  Marked by mouse and keyboard gestures, computer-drawn graphics are face mounted to plexiglass, fusing the printing ink with the thin, clear acrylic of the panel. These are unique artist inkjets produced on a large-scale color printer and positioned as an act of painting.” [1]  

[1] Carter Mull, Worlds within Planes: Martin Steele, the Flaneur, and Twenty-First Century Painting, 2018