Artist Statement
2021, wood, spray paint, acrylic paint, wire, wood glue, screws, and bells.
“What is the role of the fine arts – capital ‘p’ – Painter in the public realm?”. This is the question this project stemmed from. As a painter, I typically think of work that is designed for walls. For people who own buildings, galleries, and other indoor facilities. Moving away from those established qualities, I aimed to figure out what it might look like to create a painting exhibit dedicated to a specific outdoor public space.
The site I worked with is an area in Cornwall, Ontario, where I am from. While still being somewhat secluded, this particular area intersects a bike path, a sidewalk, a train track, and a overhead bridge, so there are a variety of people that pass through it. One area in particular that stood out to me was the underpass under the bridge, where people have done a lot of graffiti. This area became somewhat symbolic in my mind, as a representation of art from the area I grew up in. Cornwall being a small town, the Fine Arts scene is very small. We do not have a university, and the college does not have a Visual Arts program. All this in mind, I decided to create my project based around two central ideas: an implied so-called hierarchy of art, and land history/deforestation.
To make a work dedicated to this site, I felt that it should fit somewhat naturally in the area, reflecting on and uplifting all the existing qualities there, instead of diminishing them. The main piece is a three-pronged map of the area made of wood, emphasizing the geography of the location. Green spray paint is used to draw movement through the space, pink spray paint to blend the piece into it’s background and mimic the trees that the wood used to be, and black acrylic paint is used in a manner similar to graffiti art. Bells hang from the areas where the most noise is created (the bridge, train, and birds in the trees). The second two pieces are wood panels screwed to tree branches, mimicking art hanging on walls. “Streets of Cornwall” appears a few times within the graffiti drawings, and “Violators will be Prosecuted” is from a sign on the fence barring off the railroad tracks nearby.
PROJECTS
Click the images below to view our collaborations!
