August 17 – 23, 2005
The series of paintings entitled, Rotten Eden is a body of work that investigates contradiction as a legitimate mode of existence. Rotten Eden explores and demonstrates a genre of exceptions and imaginary solutions by organizing an invented language into units of structure and sense. Using motifs from art history and contemporary urban culture as “words,” a visual language is articulated by combining a grammar of abstract shapes and pictorial icons. Rotten Eden binds fantasy with reality by deploying an invented and non-sensical visual syntax that transmits intelligibility based on its own inner logic. Grounds are both ordered and chaotic, demonstrating the varied use of language’s systematic structure and spontaneous navigation within a structure. Icons are subdivided into repeated and overlapping constituents that follow a methodology, yet convey perceptual disorder. The result is a scrutiny of relationships: that between structure and chaos, sense and non-sense, image and abstraction and art historical iconography and its disjointed pieces within contemporary culture.
