I’ve been focusing on refining the small details of this latest painting, which I have discovered doesn’t exactly come across entirely well on camera. It is really slow going and a bit tedious (I can imagine to some). The gallery has asked me to come up with a title for my exhibition, which will be opening in their project space late this summer, and so I’ve been brain storming a bit with a friend on it.
I was thinking maybe dwell or habit or inhabit… as in how we dwell on things or have bad habits. I finally decided on “in-habit”…. and then wrote a bit about my ideas.
This exhibition explores issues of struggle. Weeds and overgrowth serve as a metaphor for personal or public habits or things in our lives that we wish to rid ourselves of. These things cause difficulties. Like garden weeds, we pull them out and they are gone for time, but they return. This becomes a cycle, a pattern of ongoing struggle which changes us in good or bad ways–because who is to judge what is considered a weed or not? It is something that overtakes our lives, but at the same time we are compelled to do or to be or to have. Figures play out across this “mess,” to create a suggested narrative that brings into question moments of ourselves in how we define identity, gender, animalistic behavior, sexuality and fantasy.
I’ve decided that the title of this new painting is going to be “fair game”. I think it suits.