My work is about the physical environment that exists within the Navajo reservation and the surrounding southwestern region of United States. My current area of creative focus deals with places that share personal, cultural and historical significance. The ideas that inform my work are associated with converging and diverging beliefs about land and its meaning. Land has always been the source of human struggle, conquest, and existence. It’s embedded with layers of cultural meaning and is shaped not only by human history, but by it’s own perpetual nature.
This series builds on the idea of perpetual motion and change by aligning with theories related to environmental geology and uniformitarianism, that suggest the natural world and it’s geologic processes work in the same manner today as it has before recorded (human) time; the earth is a dynamic living entity. This notion of earth’s natural processes informs the painting process of layering translucent and opaque colors in a way to suggest intersecting forms, creating dynamic compositions of movement in a static state. It’s also the conceptual framework that defines painting for me as both an illusion and abstraction, caught in a moment of time.
Just as there are layers of geologic history beneath our feet, so are the many layers of personal and cultural context embedded into the landforms of my life. I’m ultimately searching for the same otherness, or enigmatic quality ‘painting’ can have, similar to a feeling one might experience while standing in the middle of a deep canyon shaped by the shifting earth, moving water, and millions of years.