Since I began living in Baltimore, and studying at MICA, I have become increasingly interested in the physical features that populate the urban environment around me. As I ride my bicycle throughout the city each day, I often meditate on the visual rhythms that occur among flow of traffic signs and row houses lining the streets. I am beginning to become aware of the power these objects have to shape, not only our physical but, psychic travels throughout environments as well.
As an artist and printmaker, I have learned many methods of appropriation and manipulation. In much of the work I am presenting here, I have used digital photography as well as other manual means of capture, such as graphite or charcoal rubbings, to lift the signs, textures and qualities from this city that have provoked my imaginative intuitions the most. After removing these artifacts from the environments in which they emerge, I recombine them into new graphic assemblages, with hopes of producing new considerations their meanings. I consider the form my work has taken as a psychic mapping of the urban aesthetics.
Notes
Inter-section #1 and Limit are from a series of signs that I developed in my Junior Seminar class this past semester. Throughout the class, I became interested in considering the global network of traffic signs that populate most intersections throughout the world. Though these signs are meant to readily mark such areas as intersections of activity and to caution those who are traveling through in vehicles, I believe they also risiduality limit our impressions of the spaces themselves. The distinct realities of each individual intersection becomes lost within the serialized syntax of the traffic signs. The physcial are overlooked as generalized units. This allows the physical spaces to become overlooked as generalized units. As an artist, I feel like it is my role to reinscribe these signs and point out their deficits. After much experimentation and manipulation, I finally decided that a rather minimalist approach was needed to express my intentions. I used editing software to zoom into the areas within the sign symbols themselves. By doing this, I discoved a new set of symbols and spaces which I then enlarged and reinscribed back into the the frames of the signs that I took them from. My hope are that the viewer may experience a sense of uncanny as the try to decode each sign.
Untitled features a geometric cube that is known as a “Menger sponge.” The form exists as a visual reference for the fractal equation that is used to describe the surface of our skin. According to this equation, our skin is infinitely more porous than solid and has more volume than surface area. This powerful vision of our bodies as "open circuits" inspires me.
Guiding Light. 29''x41''. Collagraph, Screenprint and Linocut on Rives BFK. 2012
Inter-section #1. 25"x40". Screenprint on Lennox 100.
2012
Limit. 25"x40". Screenprint on Lennox 100.
2012
Untitled. 29"x41". Collagraph and Screenprint on Rives BFK.
2012
