local taxonomies

2020 - ongoing, oil on canvas, 40” x 50” each

“Space is often viewed in Western thinking as being static of divorced from time. This view generates ways of making sense of the world as a ‘realm of stasis,’ well-defined, fixed, and without politics... The establishment of military, missionary, or trading stations, the clearing of bush and the mining of materials all involved processes of marking, defining, and controlling space.” - Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodology

A collection of images and objects littering a self-healing cutting mat, the series Local Taxonomies imagines a bird’s-eye view of a studio table, with each object mapped onto its Cartesian grid and suggesting a set of relational points. These paintings play with distance and translation, as photographs, sketches, screenshots, and other paintings are rendered into flattened objects upon a green network surface and lose or gain recognizability. This body of work is currently in development.