2014, acrylic and pigment on birch panel.
You know the story already: lots of tears, discovering a repository of old photographs. They're still in their envelopes, a certain segment of time mixed up together. As I rifle through them, I expect each photo to feel like a punch to the gut but I feel nothing. No, I feel a disturbance even deeper, a sickness not yet surfaced.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about the punctum, a particular aspect of a photograph: "A photograph's punctum is that accident [of photographic detail] which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me), ...for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole---and also a cast of the dice." In this body of work, layers of imageless color mimic mistakes of developing or printing: misapplied emulsion, light leaks, scratched and warped negatives, signs of an unskilled hand. Each painting pines, full of nostalgia for something that never could be. These paintings take that punctum-wound and picks at the scabs.
