Transitional Metaphor

Archived Series, 2010 to 2012

This is where the landscape arrived. After the cosmic and structural work that preceded it, the practice turned to the meeting point between human construction and the natural world, and stated it fully, all at once. Pipes, vessels, channels, and industrial systems crowd these paintings, overtaken and pressed on by growth, light, and decay. Nothing is held back. The built world and the forces working on it occupy the same dense frame, in saturated color and at scale. Beneath the finished paintings runs their source. Working in grayscale, the studio moved through constructed digital environments and captured the spaces found there, structures, towers, horizons, lone forms in open terrain. These were never final works. They were the terrain the paintings were built from, the raw environments navigated and brought back by hand, then layered and saturated into the larger compositions. The method is visible in them directly: movement through built space generating the image before paint is ever applied. Within the longer arc of the practice, Transitional Metaphor marks the beginning of the landscape, and its most crowded statement. Everything that followed was a process of quieting this density and holding still what is here shown all at once. It is the overgrown origin of the landscape work, with its method laid bare underneath.