Filtration System for a Process Based Practice
Filtration System for a Process Based Practice
I started to think of Lincoln Park as an island within the city. Lincoln Park allows for an unassigned leisure that allows me a space to reflect on the systems around me. The park mid week day becomes a space of contemplation for me, I think about class structures and how they impede use of this park between 9-5pm. I think about luxury and what having time to wander this park relatively alone midweek means to me. I think about the deconstruction of ideas of what it means to be successful.
Lincoln Park inspires me to use my imagination to think about things at the park in a poetic way, they become visual gestures and metaphors that can potentially grow into ideas for artworks. These moments then converse with my own personal narratives and perspectives and take form.
Filtration System for a Process Based Practice: At the Hammer
The concrete mound covers some sort of filtration system for Lincoln Park lake/ Eastlake. It sits next to a lush little island which may be a remnant from back in the day when the park was a highly designed exotic landscape and the city’s core. The concrete mound (to a certain extent) is suppose to blend in with the natural landscape of the park.
I imagined myself on top of it, looking out from it onto the park. This thought lead me to an idea loop (of thinking) about how this “island” inside the island of the park could potentially offer a new perspective from within.
This shift in perspective became an action I wanted to perform. I began to think about the isolated nature of this park, of this mound, of my studio, and of my life as an artist. I wanted to bring this mound into my studio to create a space that was separate from the live/work space that I usually inhabit, and to offer myself a different vantage point. The studio being an island within the city but at a different scale.
In the studio the mound would be huge, it would be a sculpture, an island, and a site of production (a studio within the studio). I decided that I wanted to paint on the flat top of the form. The flat top of the form was an 8 foot diameter circle. I decided then to paint 8 foot cut muslin circlues atop the form, allowing drips from this action to mark the forms contour. ( kind of like how rain, bird shit and stuff marks the mound at the park)
I wanted to repeat this action in a sequence and perform privately in my studio. Once the form was in my studio, I wanted the surface to capture this action and act like both the documentation of the action and a painting itself. I created a cover for the mound, to both hide what was underneath (like the mound at the park hides what’s underneath) and to capture the paint drips from the action of painting the circles on its flat top.
The colors for the sequence are individually mixed, the pallet comes from the memory of my visits to the park, my visits to go see the mound. The work is a sculpture that is also a painting, that is also the documentation of the actions upon it. The sequence, the cover, the form are one work. Metal tags numbered 1-50 place each time I went atop the mound and archive the action.
Filtration System for a Process Based Practice is my height 5 feet, 4” tall. It is 14 feet wide. At the Hammer, my hope is that the scale shifts back to the feeling of this mound at the park, functioning as a cover for a filtration system of sorts. The work alludes to simple bold forms in our urban landscape and the role abstraction plays on the construction/ notions of the local. I connect with a lot of the Arte Povera Artists of the 1960’s and their focus on process, gravity, and time.