| “Dodge a Bullet,” my current solo exhibition at the Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, came about as a result of the invitation of Mark Tullos Jr., the museum’s new deputy director.This installation of painting, video and stainless steel sculpture was created in the immediate aftershock of hurricane Katrina, a time when I did a lot of floor pacing. Family and friends were among the evacuees. This repetitive studio roaming led to a video of my art process called eXile. Wearing Stella McCartney stilettos, I stalked across a reflective surface, leaving footprints that I would later paint on. Both the video and the subsequent paintings and sculpture are about displacement, about losing the reality you think you inhabit. Your spirit wanders. | 
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“Dodge a Bullet,” my current solo exhibition at the Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, came about as a result of the invitation of Mark Tullos Jr., the museum’s new deputy director.
This installation of painting, video and stainless steel sculpture was created in the immediate aftershock of hurricane Katrina, a time when I did a lot of floor pacing. Family and friends were among the evacuees. This repetitive studio roaming led to a video of my art process called eXile. Wearing Stella McCartney stilettos, I stalked across a reflective surface, leaving footprints that I would later paint on. Both the video and the subsequent paintings and sculpture are about displacement, about losing the reality you think you inhabit.
Your spirit wanders.
Try to find the path home. False starts, looking for a clearing, an emptiness opens up, light shines in. It’s not all that transcendent. It just opens up possibilities. Like candor, like an open heart.
Polish stainless steel, pierce it with gunshots, add fluorescent light. The small voids left by the bullets, my medium of the last five years, address that which we know in our bones through emptiness. One work, Lightning #1, is made of this process—the polished stainless steel rectangles aligned along an eight foot fluorescent light tube resembles a spine as well as a lightning strike. The bullet holes intensify the light. My searches have always been about what is in this space of the humble half-life. Things dematerializing. The fact that matter changes is what allows us to love.
My painting process is one of rematerializing. I layer paint over the soft aluminium surface skin of the boards that I’ve imprinted with heel marks. The goal is to fully incarnate a painting through cycles of disintegration, integration and unintegration. This is painting suspended in a state of possibilities opened to the participation of the viewer, without whom the work would be nothing.
As a student artist in New Orleans, I pored over reproductions of Soutine’s hanging carcass. Today, the “Soutine and Modern Art” exhibition now at Cheim and Read is a block from my studio in Chelsea and I visit it regularly. Here, the temporary nature of this gallery exhibition heightens the already intense viewing experience.
Soutine’s touch is surprisingly light. In the Carcass of Beef it’s actually the surrounding blue light that is excessively materialized, spread to the edges in raised paint. Its import brings to mind a nuclear accident, a blue flash of light pending the inevitable that has not yet come to pass.In this Soutine exhibition there is also a Susan Rothenberg painting on paper where a raptor has lifted a hanging carcass of rabbit. Another smaller raptor enters into the side of it. Painted in 2005, this image strikes me as a new century’s mascot, the way Fellini’s opening scene in “La Dolce Vita” (with the helicopter carrying a gilded statue of Jesus across Roman skies, a reporter and photographer (who is named Paparazzo) following behind a pilot who is trying to connect with sunbathing girls but is foiled by helicopter sounds) struck us then, with no dialogue, as introducing mid-20th century Cold War conflicts.
The early 21st century has heated up as well, gotten more visceral. Here, a carcass is suspended in American skies. In the physical stress of events; 9/11, the war in Iraq, Katrina, the Israeli-Hezbollah War, we begin to see harbingers in half-life moments. Here there is hope, not despair. Face fear. Face denials. Change. Winston Churchill once said the brutal facts were better than sweet dreams to him, that without them he wouldn’t sleep.
That is pretty much my process. I’m doing more painting while I continue with other mediums. I live in the West Village and walk by the hanging sides of beef being loaded off of trucks during my walk to the studio. This experience has led to create some video footage. Only then did I realize that I sleep better after painting. An early 21st century vehicle for vital life force, a warm medium, a blunt medium, alive again in the early 21st century. Makes sense. Pink, half fluorescent paint oozing through aching little voids with the strange iridescences of half-life.
