I’m beyond excited and grateful to announce the upcoming opening of my first international solo exhibition in Tokyo @shunartgallery. The exhibit will feature nearly 50 new artworks on paper made during the past year. With my work I focused conceptually on the use of a “Rorschach blot” technique as a visual metaphor for the contemporary disaster events with which our society is becoming increasingly overwhelmed. Within the resulting abstract landscapes, people and industrial forms attempt to coexist amidst symmetrical blotted watercolor forms that often read as explosive spectacles. This body of work has brought me to a number of interesting intersections including the use of both traditional media and digital fabrication tools, an exploration of symmetry and asymmetry, and ultimately the creation of a narrative pictorial space that is relative to our contemporary world, yet that suggests a deviation from its realities.

The Ordinary Spectacle

I believe it is the artist's challenge today to find beauty in a monstrous contemporary world. The ideal beautiful moment, for me, lives in a tension created by the unreconcilable aspects of our contemporary lives: the mundane tasks of our ordinary days are offset by virtual spectacles of intense pleasure and cataclysmic disaster. The action of these paintings is very much about "visual collision". I think they speak to the way we experience the world today: constantly attempting to mediate our mundane existences with elaborate fantasies and extreme realities we are now more exposed to through technology. I wonder, how many of us yawn as we scroll between images of something (or someone) we desire and then past the most recent global disaster on our phone?

In my recent paintings I've been focused on exploring these ideas through narratives that depict people and their attempts to cope with beautiful yet threateningly abstract worlds. The landscapes inhabited are usually marked by colossal industrial structures which are set amidst explosions of colorful pigment blots that could suggest cumulus clouds, or explosions of airborne pollutants. Specifically, in this series I've incorporated a similar method to the Rorschach ink blot technique by folding the paper in half and pressing out blots of colored watercolor. When employed as elements of a landscape they read as reflective horizons and strangely symmetrical explosions.

I chose to explore this aesthetic for its reference to human psychology. The Rorschach method was developed as a type of psychological projective test, in which a subject was asked to interpret ambiguous ink blot forms into images that relate to their world. I like the idea that the characters of I've situated within these visual spaces are unable to figure out what is going on. I also like the idea that you as a viewer may engage in this psychological projection while looking at each painting.

平凡的奇观

我相信艺术家今天面临的挑战是在可怕的当代世界中寻找美。对我来说，理想的美好时刻发生在当下不可调和的紧张氛围之中：我们的平凡被虚拟的强烈快乐感和灾难所抵消。 我的这些画很大程度上是关于“视觉碰撞”, 我认为它们反映了我们当今体验世界的方式：不断尝试用复杂的幻想和我们现在通过技术更多地接触到的极端现实来调和我们的平凡存在。我想知道，我们中有多少人在自己想要的某物（或某人）的图像之间打着哈欠，然后在手机上欣赏最近发生的全球性的灾难？

在近作中，我一直专注于通过描绘人们以及他们应对美丽但具有威胁性的世界看法与反应。人们居住的景观通常以巨大的被废弃的工业建筑为标志，这些建筑坐落在彩色颜料斑点的爆炸之中，可能让人们联想到积云或充溢着空气污染物的爆炸。 具体来说，在本系列中，我采用了与罗夏墨迹技术或类似的方法，即将纸张对折并压出彩墨痕迹。 当用作景观元素时，它们被解读为反射地平线和奇异的对称性爆炸。

我选择探索这种美学是因为想给人类心理学的一些参考。 罗夏墨迹法是一种心理投射测试，要求受试者将模糊的墨迹形式解释与其生活的世界相关联的图像。 我喜欢这样的想法，即我无法弄清楚这些视觉空间中的正在发生什么。 我也喜欢这样的想法：作为观众，你在观看每幅画时可能有相似的心理投射。