The Strata Series

When we think of past experiences, places we’ve visited, or people we’ve known, we’re not drawing on a unified continuum of experience. Rather these entities exist in our memories as collections of moments, collaged together and plastered with a label—School, Friend, Work. Whether very general (e.g., “Human”) or quite specific (“Stephen”), these concepts live in the mind as aggregations of snapshots, pasted together in no particular order, the most recent blended with the most distant (and all of the others) to create a representation of whatever the thing, place, person, or idea may be.

The Strata Paintings involve a kind of editing that’s similar to what our brains do in constructing images of the people and things that we remember. I layer many sections over one another, keeping the parts that I like and painting over the less memorable elements, or modifying them so that they fit with my idea of what the whole is (or should be). Just as our brains forget many unremarkable experiences, my paintings contain lots of layers beneath the visible surface, which nevertheless influence their perception in subtle ways.

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