Cities are full of abstract viewing experiences. I take my daily journeys as an opportunity to find them and reframe them in my work. Paying particular attention to the underdogs and supports in architectural relationships and painted surfaces.

​

I am interested in gleaning, grafting, and the process of moving these observations into segments of objects and installations. There is a back and forth, a reciprocal relationship between object and painting made, while mostly making repetitive and modular components that can act as temporary, unfixed arrangements.

​

In this body of work, UNO X UNO, I have been using these modular components to make more permanent works, crumpled wall hung objects that stitch together these components into discrete objects.

​

Like my interest in moving between permanence and impermanence, I strive to have a working process that takes the material through dif- ferent states. To make the material I formed the canvas into temporary structures by folding it into an object, painting it, and taking it back to a flat surface, blurring the lines between object and pictorial plane. Other canvas pieces are masked and striped and yet others are produced with printmaking/stenciling approach, where paint is pressed through a loose weave of fabric. The painted sections are then sewn together into wall-hung objects.

​

The wall treatment is one I have used several times in my practice. I have made wallpapers that echo the painted designs in my work or striped objects. This iteration pays tribute to the beautiful array of painted surfaces here in Mexico City. A great deal of my work relies on the beauty of striped patterns, and I have become attuned to finding them. Stripes oscillate between clarity and camouflage; confrontation and retreat; revealing and concealing. These are all variations of illusion and I find them dazzling and endlessly attractive.

​

As opposed to solid color, the stripe constitutes a deviance, an accent, a mark or a striking out. Stripes, like bright color, have been derided historically in art as belonging to the profane and the marginal. I couldn’t be happier to seek these things out in my life and to be here in Mexico City, where with ease, I see beautiful colors and painted stripes, everywhere I look.

​

​

​

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of Ontario Arts Council.