“What Do You Do When You No Longer Know What Good Is” depicts imagined moments within the lifespan of a work of art. Born from asking myself: “How does a work of art come to be?” and, “Where does art go when it dies?” I sought to stage and act out these scenarios by constructing three-dimensional models— like dioramas—to be photographed, digitally altered, and transformed into stipple drawings. This notion of explaining art to myself quickly evolved into making art for art, art for me, art about me, art about me and art, and so on.

I started to look at commercials. In particular, ones produced by movie theater companies to be showcased alongside main attractions. These brief adverts parade the typical accoutrements of the theatrical movie-viewing experience— popcorn, soda, film projectors, jazz instruments— coming to life and traversing the space between the audience and image. I used this type of self-referential display to inform and develop my own story about a work of art.

Stippling has its own affiliations with fantasy and gaudy realism. It’s a lowbrow enterprise— the stuff of Fantasia, MC Escher, Alice in Wonderland, high school notebooks and Zap Comics. If surrealism is its friend, Post-minimalism is its foe. Stipple drawings reveal within them an atomic sense of order— a fluid yet divisible form of matter characterized by clusters of dots. Objects appear vibrantly uncertain, as if undergoing a constant physical transformation. It’s a useful tool for illustrating the things we cannot see.

In this work: blobs, ogres, explosions, theatre props, and checkered floors re-imagine the artist’s domain as a site for comedy and redemption. “What Do You Do When You No Longer No What Good Is?” was a note-to-self that inspired a series of questions that served as prompts for these drawings. It’s a question concerning the stuff of art and its meaning in our lives.

Haw Contemporary Stockyards