reflecting on troika

A lot of my recent work explores frameworks of order and what might be considered its opposite, disorder—but, I think, a better word is dynamic. 

During the government shutdown a while back, I was waiting for supplies stuck in customs and started a series of drawings exploring plans for a large-scale installation. The install never happened, but the drawings took on a life of their own and are still evolving, almost two years later. 

The series is called Troika, referring to a 19th century carriage drawn by three horses. The middle horse toes the line, buckled to the carriage in an elaborate harness, striding forward in long wide arcs. In contrast, the two other horses on either side are buckled less rigidly, looser. They respond to the actual conditions of the road — its uneven terrain, pits and stones, distractions, fears, curiosities — improvising in the spaces within the structure of a particular and ever-changing journey. 

These are ideas I explore in my drawings and installations. I start with a grid or a defined framework, and then the piece grows from there. My hands, biases, intuition, compulsion, desire and frustration buck against and press into the system initially laid on the paper. The drawing captures an interplay between mark-making and erasing, choices and decisions, input and feedback. I stop when that interplay comes to a rest.

The drawings may appear abstract, but to me, are literal. How to act, how to perform, how to widen what’s possible, how to pull away and reimagine what could be? Can we play and interplay with each other? Can we cherish these improvisations, these wellings of need and desire? Can we listen, and shift, and change? Can we find and create something new, something strong, something tender, something that sustains? That includes more of us all moving forward together?