TROIKA

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, two years later. Out of forty or so drawings, I chose ten to turn into prints.

The title of the series refers to a 19th-century carriage drawn by three horses. The middle horse toes the line, galloping from point A to point B, buckled to the carriage in an elaborate harness. In contrast, the two other horses, on either side, have much looser bridles and respond to the actual conditions of the road — its uneven terrain, pushing and pulling to avoid pits and stones, registering fears, distractions, curiosities — improvising within the given structure of a particular trajectory, a single journey. Much of my work revolves around this idea: where form devolves and pulls apart, where order breaks down and is reimagined, where the space between things expands or collapses, compressing and opening into what wasn’t there or anticipated.

For each drawing, I start with a grid or a defined framework, then 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 the play comes to a rest.

The drawings may appear abstract, but to me, they’re literal. How to act, how to perform, how to widen what’s possible, how to pull away and reimagine what could be? 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?

Archival inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 305 gsm. Sheets are 19" x 13". Prints are signed, stamped, chopped, and numbered. Edition of ten, printed 2020 and 2021.

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