north

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"Sometime, I'd like to see the originals."
North is a series of paintings, a film of these paintings and a lithographic handmade artist's book of the paintings. The paintings themselves depict disappearing places, the ecological casualties of entangling technological and atmospheric forces-- industrialization, and global warming respectively. I visited these places vicariously, by searching the Internet for images of these locations. Just as places upon the Earth are heated and changed, exposed and submerged, similar forces work within the our global systems of information: the source images for these paintings may not have been found online before the day they inspired these paintings, and most cannot be found now. Art itself traffics in the same dynamics of search, exposure, revelation and inundation that shape our world and information systems. My work injects the tropes and cliches of the history of painting into the fugitive ecology of the contemporary art world. Painting can function as a stopping point, attempting to re-inject meaning into cliché, bled of its originating profundity.
A mentor of mine viewed some of the paintings. After an hour-long critique, he quite sincerely stated, "Sometime, I'd like to see the originals." He had mistaken the paintings for lithographs. The image moves downstream, from source to inspiration to creation to reproduction to oblivion. As gravity pulls downward, and waters rise, lateral space floods, hierarchy erodes, nullified. A disorientation ensues, and can permeate and deteriorate our sense of place and placement. -Count Dracula Dec. 25, 1897