auto d'fey
As a young artist dedicated to mastering his craft, I have
experimented ruthlessly with materials, technique, subject matter, and
style, maintaining a voracious rate of procession from one art
historical reference to the next, and one "set" or "series" or
"project", to the next. The central concept in the work, it's raison
d'etat, is that labor; blind, stupid, searching labor; the application
of will to a surface with dedicated, dogged material application,
forming a dialectical struggle, an arena of experiment, groping,
grasping, failing, hopefully on a hopeless search for meaning in the
infinity of possible moves on the picture plane; that this task, this
process, alone, might speak the new word. Might light the new path
forward.
This myth, the artist hero myth, alone, is the substance and subject
of my sprawling, unfocused, diffuse, inchoate, irresponsible,
irrepressible body of work. It is a performance piece. It is a burn. The
whole
thing.
An auto d'fey.
--
JQ, 2011
experimented ruthlessly with materials, technique, subject matter, and
style, maintaining a voracious rate of procession from one art
historical reference to the next, and one "set" or "series" or
"project", to the next. The central concept in the work, it's raison
d'etat, is that labor; blind, stupid, searching labor; the application
of will to a surface with dedicated, dogged material application,
forming a dialectical struggle, an arena of experiment, groping,
grasping, failing, hopefully on a hopeless search for meaning in the
infinity of possible moves on the picture plane; that this task, this
process, alone, might speak the new word. Might light the new path
forward.
This myth, the artist hero myth, alone, is the substance and subject
of my sprawling, unfocused, diffuse, inchoate, irresponsible,
irrepressible body of work. It is a performance piece. It is a burn. The
whole
thing.
An auto d'fey.
--
JQ, 2011
Artist Statement, Fall, 2011
My artwork constantly moves back and forth between imagination and experience, by turns abstract, stylized, representational, expressive, surreal, and symbolic, nonetheless a central expressive voice is maintained throughout it's oscillations and variations: my voice. Core emotional themes of desire, mourning, hope, confusion and love run throughout. Dreams, myth, literature, music, history, subcultures, meta narrative, critical theory, art history, contemporary art, the internet, architectural design, construction material and techniques, documentation from personal adventuring and a deep sense of my duty to burn brightly before I go out are the ingredients I use to make my pictures.
As a young artist dedicated to mastering his trade, I have experimented ruthlessly with material, technique, subject matter, and style, maintaining a voracious rate of procession from one art historical reference to the next, and one "set" or "series" or "project", to the next. The central concept in the work, it's raison d'etat, is that labor--near blind, stupid, searching labor; application of will to a surface with dedicated, dogged, material application, forming a dialectical struggle, an arena of experiment, groping, grasping, failingly hopeful on a hopeless search for meaning in the infinity of possible moves on the picture plane; that this task, this process, alone, might speak the new word. Might light the new path forward.
This myth, the artist hero myth, alone, is the substance and subject of my sprawling, unfocused, diffuse, inchoate, irresponsible, irrepressible body of work. It is a performance piece. The whole thing. It's an auto d'fey.
See,
Art, the word, for me, signifies movement in response to an individually heard spiritual calling to gain better understanding of the fundamental processes of one's lived reality. In my personal process, I am exploring relationships. That is the call to arms. To understand what this is, vis a vis that. I am tracing my minds' movement between ideas, forms, emotions, and memories. Communicating my personal experiences with the broader cultural experiences of my society, through making work, exhibiting it and displaying it's simulacra on the internet, is a wild desperate stab at increasing the net sum of knowledge, understanding and compassion in the world, if only by a tiny bit. Making pictures has been me trying to actualize my ideal of doing some small good in the world. There is a greatness, an absurd greatness, in this desire.
In addition to creating 2-d art, I also work work with sound and light, organize co-operative public art projects, produce and curate events, run a spatial design and construction business, create site specific mobile gallery installations, freelance graphic design, shoot digital photography, write, blog, cook and just love the snot out of my people.
If interested in purchasing original work, booking an exhibition, commissioning a project, consulting or estimating for a design/build project, or have questions or comments about the artwork, please send me an email via the contact link. Limited edition giclee prints and other merchandise are available on the store page and can be purchased by clicking on the list prices and proceeding through a Paypal checkout.
Thank you for visiting my site. I hope you enjoy.
As a young artist dedicated to mastering his trade, I have experimented ruthlessly with material, technique, subject matter, and style, maintaining a voracious rate of procession from one art historical reference to the next, and one "set" or "series" or "project", to the next. The central concept in the work, it's raison d'etat, is that labor--near blind, stupid, searching labor; application of will to a surface with dedicated, dogged, material application, forming a dialectical struggle, an arena of experiment, groping, grasping, failingly hopeful on a hopeless search for meaning in the infinity of possible moves on the picture plane; that this task, this process, alone, might speak the new word. Might light the new path forward.
This myth, the artist hero myth, alone, is the substance and subject of my sprawling, unfocused, diffuse, inchoate, irresponsible, irrepressible body of work. It is a performance piece. The whole thing. It's an auto d'fey.
See,
Art, the word, for me, signifies movement in response to an individually heard spiritual calling to gain better understanding of the fundamental processes of one's lived reality. In my personal process, I am exploring relationships. That is the call to arms. To understand what this is, vis a vis that. I am tracing my minds' movement between ideas, forms, emotions, and memories. Communicating my personal experiences with the broader cultural experiences of my society, through making work, exhibiting it and displaying it's simulacra on the internet, is a wild desperate stab at increasing the net sum of knowledge, understanding and compassion in the world, if only by a tiny bit. Making pictures has been me trying to actualize my ideal of doing some small good in the world. There is a greatness, an absurd greatness, in this desire.
In addition to creating 2-d art, I also work work with sound and light, organize co-operative public art projects, produce and curate events, run a spatial design and construction business, create site specific mobile gallery installations, freelance graphic design, shoot digital photography, write, blog, cook and just love the snot out of my people.
If interested in purchasing original work, booking an exhibition, commissioning a project, consulting or estimating for a design/build project, or have questions or comments about the artwork, please send me an email via the contact link. Limited edition giclee prints and other merchandise are available on the store page and can be purchased by clicking on the list prices and proceeding through a Paypal checkout.
Thank you for visiting my site. I hope you enjoy.
JQ: LTD Artist Statement for 2010/2011
The work in this portfolio, created summer/fall 2010, explores boundary spaces between emotional and physical memory, between desires and needs, between social and psychic identities, between painting and performing, between existence and being. I have been exploring the visual possibilities in limiting my palette to whites and grays and have found a myriad of metaphorical functions of this strategy. White is an Ur color, functioning as both forgetting and potential, it can illuminates form and at the same time erase it. It is about race and class, God and the absences of God; white denotes purity, and this purity, in paint, is specious, contingent and manifold.
Technically, I am in a space between painting and drawing, and moving towards painting and eventually towards more multi dimensional work (site specific, installation, performance etc, in conjunction with painting). By combining representational imagery amid pictorial spaces formed by matrices of intuitive marks, I suggest deconstructed narratives that revolve around questions of class, sexual politics, and archetypes. I cultivate areas of accident, erasure or incompleteness in my compositions as reservoirs of potentiality, an important affect of deconstructionist theory in contemporary art. The creative process itself, as a metaphor for consciousness, is the inspiration and subject of much of my work. In essence, each piece of art I make is a self-portrait, a record of a period of my process, the traces of a flame, a circle of questions.
My dedication to the creative process is an expression of my highest ideals and is central to my identity. By maintaining a vibrant studio practice I focus my energies on activities that do not directly support the military industrial complex, and as such I feel that art making is an inherently political as well as a personal decision. My goals in living a life focused on creating aesthetic expressions of consciousness are: to contribute to building community that supports and fosters creativity and dialog, to live a life fully examined, and to shine my small light into the unrelenting darkness of our times...(money, fame, and beautiful lovers do hover in the periphery of my intentions, however, I’m not going to lie).
In addition to being a path towards an ideal, I recognize art as a situated, contingent and dynamic entity with it’s own shifting sets of values, truths, and realities. There is an anxious emotional weight born of an historical perspective that we are living in a late society in most of my work, and formal echoing a recent Modernism in my work, to my mind, indicates the emotional and historical, and human, proximity I feel to their chief concerns. Concerns of annihilation and the failure of our race (species), individual meaninglessness within the supra human scales of human enterprises (and failures), wonder at the origins of this mess, along with a stubborn, abiding hope and capacity to imagine a thing such as beauty, today feel so achingly relevant that I have felt obligated to explore their shapes, their methods, their idealisms, to see what there is in purging meaning through process, in exploring multiple perspective in image, and in conflating the illusion of a picture with it’s physical reality.
Technically, I am in a space between painting and drawing, and moving towards painting and eventually towards more multi dimensional work (site specific, installation, performance etc, in conjunction with painting). By combining representational imagery amid pictorial spaces formed by matrices of intuitive marks, I suggest deconstructed narratives that revolve around questions of class, sexual politics, and archetypes. I cultivate areas of accident, erasure or incompleteness in my compositions as reservoirs of potentiality, an important affect of deconstructionist theory in contemporary art. The creative process itself, as a metaphor for consciousness, is the inspiration and subject of much of my work. In essence, each piece of art I make is a self-portrait, a record of a period of my process, the traces of a flame, a circle of questions.
My dedication to the creative process is an expression of my highest ideals and is central to my identity. By maintaining a vibrant studio practice I focus my energies on activities that do not directly support the military industrial complex, and as such I feel that art making is an inherently political as well as a personal decision. My goals in living a life focused on creating aesthetic expressions of consciousness are: to contribute to building community that supports and fosters creativity and dialog, to live a life fully examined, and to shine my small light into the unrelenting darkness of our times...(money, fame, and beautiful lovers do hover in the periphery of my intentions, however, I’m not going to lie).
In addition to being a path towards an ideal, I recognize art as a situated, contingent and dynamic entity with it’s own shifting sets of values, truths, and realities. There is an anxious emotional weight born of an historical perspective that we are living in a late society in most of my work, and formal echoing a recent Modernism in my work, to my mind, indicates the emotional and historical, and human, proximity I feel to their chief concerns. Concerns of annihilation and the failure of our race (species), individual meaninglessness within the supra human scales of human enterprises (and failures), wonder at the origins of this mess, along with a stubborn, abiding hope and capacity to imagine a thing such as beauty, today feel so achingly relevant that I have felt obligated to explore their shapes, their methods, their idealisms, to see what there is in purging meaning through process, in exploring multiple perspective in image, and in conflating the illusion of a picture with it’s physical reality.
