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Synthetic Being
Contemporary Art Center of Peoria
Peoria, IL
June 30 - August 11, 2023
My art practice is an analog response to developments in the life sciences that are enabling alterations to the genomes of a range of organisms, including humans. Adopting the visual culture of biology as metaphor and armature, I treat paint as if it were an organism, exploring its material, chromatic and formal properties using a process that combines chance occurrences with a systematic approach. The paintings that result feature naturally unnatural hybrid forms that merge the manufactured and the organic.
The methodology guiding my practice is time-intensive and requires continuous experimentation with paint and thinning agents; repeated pouring, peeling, sanding, cutting and layering; and the recycling and reintegration of elements from disassembled works. As the surface of the painting develops, it becomes a record of my negotiations between opacity and translucency, flatness and dimensionality, expansion and containment, chance and control.
Synthetic Being, the show’s title, can be read as a simple description, comprised of an adjective and noun, alluding to an organism that has been engineered in a lab. But it also operates as a question: Synthetic being…? How we answer that question has profound implications for our future.