RECENT FUTURE
Whether we lived in a house, a hospital room, or a tent, our lives shrank during the years 2020 - 2022.
Recent Future is a series of more than two hundred tiny paintings, made with a plastic material called Shrinkydink, a children’s toy. When heated in an ordinary oven, the original 4" x 5" paintings contract to 1/3 of their size, with textural artifacts resulting from heat and shrinkage.
These very small works – 2.25" x 1.75" – are cameos, miniature portraits of our days.
Experiments with the simple children’s toy that shrinks plastic and paint resulted in a way to represent our communal experience with the pandemic: the shrinking of our worlds.
In my art practice, I work with pigments, mirrored glass and tar paper, and I draw on paper with an electrode on a copper table. Arcane materials with unpredictable outcomes allow for accident and serendipity, an important part of my work. Shrinkydink is the latest — and the most unexpected — of them all to date.
