- Selected Projects:
chaos
urban disorder
These paintings are an exploration of the duality that exists within urban environments. Through urban planning and architecture, societies attempt to impose order and structure on the environment. Despite rigorous planning, urban environments are inherently chaotic and are ever changing. I am interested in the layering that takes place over time as order is laid down and chaos pushes back.
The struggle between order and chaos exists at all levels within cities, from the micro to the macro. The clutter of everyday objects mindlessly piled in one person’s studio apartment may be carefully contained within the structural grid of a building. Borders of neighborhoods which were once clearly defined often shift, changing over time. The idealized rectilinear grid work of city streets must contend with local topography causing irregular bends and curves in the system.
For this project I developed drawings derived from my urban surroundings, from the bottles and cans stacked in my kitchen to the buildings and signs that make up the streetscapes of San Francisco. I then forced these images to collide in the paintings, and as I built each layer the forms become increasingly abstracted so that only fragments remain and often the original image is buried all together.
The intent of this exploration is to provoke the viewer to consider their surroundings and the impact of the built environment on their daily life. The seemingly fixed form of a city is constantly evolving and there exists an ever-present tension between order and disorder.