Synthetic materials have been at the core of my practice for the last decade. They provide a medium through which to record their own time of production--in the form of layers, strata, etc.--and serve as markers of the persistence of a kind of manufacturing--differentiated, customized, but also divested of gestural imprint--that has survived the advent of the digital. Resin, in particular, connects the paintings and sculptures I’ve produced. Resin’s traits, contradictory and complimentary in relation to dominant contemporary methods of production, offers literal and allegorical readings of spaces that fall outside an algorithm-saturated social and commodity world. In the “Scratch Paintings,” even the transitional smoothness of the resin as visual complicity with and manufacturing distance from serial luxury forms, is interrupted. Due to its very nature, resin seeks a natural level, which gives it its featureless and smooth quality. A sense of impenetrability. It’s often referred to as candy-like or gem-like--pristine, hard, a symbol of perfection. Through multiple, apparently haphazard, scratches with an awl or an engraver’s tool, the surfaces of the paintings are “damaged.” This returns them to the entropic deterioration that resin seeks to escape. The first “Scratch Painting” was a damaged monochrome black; the scratched lines were “white” grooves or as sight lines back through the poured layers. In Dopesick the “Scratch Paintings” while still monochrome, now use neon pigments to tint the resin. The neon hue ratchets up the synthetic feel of the work, and builds on the visual tension of the scrawled line.

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