THIS WILD DESIRE: New Work at Morning Times Gallery

(9.29 Update: work from this series is now viewable here.)

This September, I'm pleased to be showing new paintings and mixed-media work at the Morning Times Gallery in downtown Raleigh.

This work represents my reengagement with painting following some time away. [Since last fall, I’ve been working on a collaborative community art project commissioned by the Town of Chapel Hill.*] 

Returning to studio this summer, I had to negotiate between my intuitive approach to my own work and the complex, other-oriented artmaking of that recently-completed collaborative project. As always seems to be the case, perceived conflicts fall away once I get my hands dirty.

In some ways, these may be my most personal paintings. They collect and convey things I’ve kept, things I’ve found, things I’ve made — affinities, totems, my “life and contacts” (to conjure Pound). The contents of these pieces are symbolically and practically important to my ongoing attempts to understand myself. But these pieces are not just for me. In that space between life and art, I try to make things that speak for themselves. 

The title of the show is a riff on Pound, too — in “The Spring” he creates an image of cyclical rebirth, tempered with lingering bittersweet change. This is a fall show, yes, but for me it feels like newness emerges … as haunted as it may be by the spectre of what (and who) was. 

* In that project, called Dream Acts, I worked with two other artists in a community primarily composed of Hispanic immigrants and political refugees from Burma and Thailand. Making art in this community was less about my personal psychic negotiations and more about an outward-oriented process of building trust — ultimately, facilitating a different mode of speaking for a very dynamic, provisional community with sometimes limited access to the arts apparatus in the Triangle.