shift
Selected works
These paintings are enthusiastic objects of visual discourse: a bit clumsy, a bit gauche, more than a bit vaudevillian. That is to say, they have been unapologetically built to get and keep the audience’s attention, with garish, high-pitched color combinations and acrobatic, pratfalling forms.
These forms, of course, are material, as the textures of thick paint testify to both a past, human-made process and a three-dimensionality that is present before the viewer. In another vein, they are also, simply, pictures: flat, two-dimensional images referencing external things (for example, signage and landscape). In all of this, the Shift paintings, like all paintings, act as metaphor for what a painting is and does—an object that gestures outward, to its sources, and a thing that simultaneously draws attention to the self-referencing presence of its surface.
