Your show Cato at EMERGency Room - Rice University Art Gallery, you were addressing abstraction in sculpture. In the current climate within the multiplicity of thinking of how abstraction can be addressed, how do you wish this body of work to operate?
The works in the show are based on ballistic diagrams. They are drawings of the trajectories of different caliber bullets. Rounds are fired into ballistics gelatin, which closely resembles anesthetized pig flesh, which closely resembles human flesh. I spent a while looking for these. I knew they existed, but couldn’t figure out where I had seen them. I got in touch with the NRA, FBI, Houston Police Department, and a private forensics lab looking for these diagrams. None of them had what I was looking for. I eventually found them on a right wing militia man’s blog.
When I saw the drawings I was struck with how much the negative cavities created by bullets resembled both Franz West’s adaptives and Brancusi’s Bird in Space. This was the starting point for the sculptures.
The sculptures look like abstractions, are displayed as abstractions of a specific art historical period, but they are also direct representations. The abstraction in the work comes from the process of making them. Taking one idea and altering, and altering it again, each time masking the previous states. I am interested in creating something that negates its own source and its own making. A representation without a model.
As a recent resident of the Core Program, Houston Museum of Fine Arts 2009- 2010, how did this program aid your work? What were you working through in the residency?
The Core Program was a very supportive environment to be in, especially as a bridge between school and practice. It is a two year program, which gave me time to work through ideas, and distill them. When I first came I was thinking a lot about representations of history, especially reenactments. In working through those ideas I became more interested in how reenactments serve as a doubling of an event. It is a representation of a thing, and the thing itself. Focusing on this doubling allowed me to move away from history, and a lot of possibilities opened up.
Being a Core Fellow opened a lot of doors here in Houston. The community here is small, but still exciting. Beyond just the great list of visitors that I met with as part of the program, I also got to meet private collectors and see how they live with art.
You are currently an artist in resident with G. A. R. Galveston, TX. Tell us more about this residency and were do you see your work going from here?
This is the first year of the program. There are three residents and we’re each provided with a studio, a stipend and an apartment. Galveston is about an hour south of Houston, a barrier Island at the mouth of Galveston Bay. In a lot of ways it is like most other beach towns but there is a weirdness here that I really like. Right now, directly outside my studio there is a Civil War Reenactment and two Cruise ships with all their passengers milling around, and this is the off season. It is a great place to make work.
Who are you looking at right now and what is inspiring you?
Francis by Picabia.
erotic objects and Chastity Wedge
Warhol’s Shadows installed at the Hirschorn.
Early in their careers both Judd (Cadmium Red Light) and Morris (Gray) painted all their objects one color.
Cy Twombly Sculpture.
Francesca Fuchs
Fairfield Porter
Allegerhi I Boetti
Matt Connors
St. Maurice
Abraham Storer
Stuart Davis
John McPhee
Francis Parkman
Lastly, what is your greatest concern as an artist?
Painting by other means