Carry at once

Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, ON
Screenprint on board
2016

The formal appearance of the work intentionally resembles a series of paintings by Jasper Johns referred to as “Flagstones” that contained a pattern that Johns reconstructed from memory of a wall pattern he had seen in a small store. The pattern in these paintings, in addition to the reference to Johns, evokes both the pattern of a stone wall and floor and consequently our relationship to the picture as one that represents either something in front of or beneath us. The pattern for the paintings is produced by a series of steps beginning with a custom font used to create a noise pattern necessary for an algorithm called a Voronoi Diagram, an algorithm typically used to subdivide a surface into a cellular pattern that mathematically evokes patterns found in nature. The product is a picture that “gets close” in appearance to the Jasper Johns paintings while also encoding a text into an image resembling a stone pattern. The work contains both a desire to reproduce the formal puzzle of the Jasper Johns painting and the form of a parable—an abbreviated story of daily life oftentimes with a cryptic moral message—encoded in the image. The content of the parable centers on the concept of “building,” a term that is both an object, action and force in history. It is a node that connects to a number of other nodes subdividing the surface of the paintings thereby spreading and attenuating the didactic function of the parable over a number of other threads.