My practice lives in the space between theory and dream. A self-cannibalizing research process seeps into the artifact. Information implodes into fever dream.
In the past two years, my deep dive into the subgenre of velvet painting explored the contradictions of velvet as both holy material and low-brow painting surface. Infused with saturated color on a dense backdrop, these works contemplate dichotomies of gender, shame / pleasure, luxury / deficit, and technological development / dissociation. Ranging across disparate bodies of work, the history of velvet painting is referenced yet razed, implicitly and explicitly, from kitsch cartoon cowboy-ballerinas to velvet Vanitas.
This led me to realize that velvet painting is an act of desecration: violence towards the sacred.
On the surface, this line of inquiry can be read as a critique of value hierarchies and their structural violence; the dark side of modern progress and its externalities, extracting Earth into inanimate resource. But as I reached towards a velvet theory, any central locus began to unravel, spinning into erotically charged and neurotically charred abstractions of some eternally elusive elucidation…
Velvet took me to a different place, yet harbored home for a deeper wellspring of my becoming…
The presence-in-absence of the black velvet, its vibrating volcanic hum, its black beyond binaries. A conjuring, a cosmogony of sci-fi horror, dark, sinister, French louche elegance, a mystical, occult, sexual and consciousness-bending conspiracy of psychedelic violence.
The future can be attained through the ancient. An animistic and alchemical practice negotiates the limits of perception and what occurs behind, beneath or within.
The diagrams required to produce a religious scripture or a digital code, the technology of an invisibility shield or a consciousness device, when the advanced practice approaches the mystical, when ritual and management coagulate to produce a seamless impossibility, then, maybe, I can offer a fragmented glimpse into the immutable.
The dust speaks in tongues.
