Detail View
Hard Edge Painting (Phase Two), 2011
The ability to record and erase anticipated the possibilities of the endless mutable self, the protagonist of the post industrial age.
-Hua Hsu
Recently i re-read this article in an old issue of Artforum. I like this statement since it indirectly touches on some ideas that i think about in relation to some of my work, specifically the hard edge paintings. I think people often mis-interpret my paintings as being specifically about graffiti. The work incorporates it and pays homage to its history but in essence I'm using it as a starting point to explore larger cultural issues.
My use of graffiti is both a personal element of my own history as a graff writer and an essential part of the overall formal composition in the same way color or texture is used. It's similar to the way painters use the figure as a means to explore various issues related to painting. I use the language of graffiti and abstraction to explore cultural constructs. How history is seen through this spectrum, how it's understood and the social dynamic between high and low cultural forms of expression. I'm also interested in the similarities between the history of abstraction and its utopian ideals and that of urban culture.
