Sentinels 2015 / 2019

A series involving encrypted signage you might come upon in a post-apocalyptic woods. Charged, radiating icons, purpose unknown. The sparkly sugarcoating lends a crunchy, desirous quality, a product-lust of satisfaction. Recycling upgrade. Trinkets to transcendence.

The Sentinels are partly about repurposing and recycling, and stand as a sort of trophy of our culture of consumption and discarding. Ordinary and found materials — driftwood, plastic packaging — are transformed almost alchemically into something mystical, other, and signal a way of taking the world we’re confronted with and reshaping it.

My point of entry was a fascination with friezes — relief sculptures that decorate buildings — and plaques and trophies, and the kitschy knife-edge they rest on.

The merging of driftwood and blister packs conflate yesterday with the contemporary. The pieces somehow feel both ancient and futuristic, as if they’ve been around forever in the future. Sugarcoated manifestations of the surveillance divine.

About

Extracted from an email to a friend about the Sentinels

The planks are from the Glenbrook, Nevada pier that have been submerged in Lake Tahoe for a hundred years (c 1870’s).  They were part of a logging camp that supplied the wood to build Virginia City during the Silver Rush heydays. These pieces are somewhat about friezes, plaques, and trophies.

I always thought a frieze was both a half-assed painting and a half-assed sculpture, resting awkwardly somewhere in between. I’d been doing these blister pack paintings in the mid-2000’s (my ‘white paintings’) and using this plastic refuse as image units to create patterns and textures. A few years later - 2015 -  this flood of abstraction burst forth. I started using blister pack textured surfaces and slapping Malevich inspired geometric modernism over them, and plugging them in, literally, with power cords. I’d been using large blister packs as a palette to hold paint as I painted. I turned one over and was blown away, and  thought, that is exquisite painting, I need to use that! Combined - the driftwood planks and the blister packs - have a contemporary/historical conflation that is really compelling. The framed pieces in the series are early 2oth century upgraded frames.

I was seeking to create some bizarre totem or sentinel or signage signal thing that if you came upon in some post-apocalyptic woods it would seem like a blend between something natural and technological, some charged electronic yet ancient, primal gizmo you discover but have no idea it’s purpose.

And the carmelized sugarized coating gives them this lush desirous quality, a built-in product lust - I wanted to make them desirable.  Somehow they are really speaking to people.