Work on Paper

I have been thinking about high modernist, monochrome paintings (Malevich’s Black Square, Ad Reinhardt, Stella’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Rothko’s late work)—and how their oblivion, their obsessive death drive, their nihilism, have this hard butch overwhelming size. I wondered what it would mean to make work that was smaller, built up from common and vernacular materials, made by hand, and through this accretive growth kept the materialism and jettisoned the nihilism.

I thought about how we are able to reproduce our images, and also about the current glut of reproduced images, about what makes image making obsolete, and about what it means to continue to use the vernacular or the small to mark the death and rebirth of this image making technology, pushing against that nihilism of monochromatic paintings.

The Work on Paper exhibition will have three riffs on this — a long scroll where I hand relief print the image of the tall carbon against the long scroll; six inkjet prints of a portion of an analog time card placed in the middle of a contemporary reproduction of a Victorian death card, and then two digital photographs of cladding in front of a condo — plywood painted black, graffitied over, and painted again. Each of these is an anti-sublime measure against modernism’s monolithic history.