Waiting Room

In Waiting Room formal lessons learned from Matisse about interior spaces, reverse lines and shifted perspectives are employed to create an imaginary and disrupted interior space. The characters that inhabit the space are combatants, static from boredom, or waiting for something apocalyptic to happen. The characters are like sharks kept in tanks, each break in the surface of the tank stutters with an invisible pulse detected only by the sharks, the seams repel and disrupt them. Disrupted by the slightest hint of architectural space or the edges of things, lines switch between reverse and positive between figure and ground, transparent and solid, between dark and light.

A central figure, embedded in the ground, looks up through goggles while other figures wear various forms of headgear; helmets, caps or alternate heads. A corridor leads from the back of the room toward a dark rectangle in the distance. It could be a door or an indication of space beyond. On the left side of the corridor are eight more doorways, bathed in a toxic green light, these could be doorways to spaces beyond, or cubicles, one for each of the waiting guests. The figures are drawn quickly through wet paint interacting with each other through the lines and inversions and with the architecture through the solid and dashed lines, within the solid forms there are hints of skeletal interiors as if seen through some form of penetrable vision.

In this work, the initial sketch was simply an armature to contain the visual shrapnel that made its way into the painting from multiple sources including: social experiences, political satire, dystopian sci-fi, cinema, institutions, popular culture, high art, science, paintings and antiquities. Moving between drawing and painting metamemorial images evolve that cannot help but reference previous experience, histories of art and the current social-political context in which we exist amid ‘alternative truths’ ‘fake news’ and histories being re-written. The narrative remains open it is porous and contingent, darkly humorous and scripted with political intent.