Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience.
For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.
On a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture?
Stores are the same everywhere; small downtowns are done. Not just in America, but globally. You hear the same music on every station, all our building materials look the same, and all our clothes look the same. But I thought that it couldn't be that simple, because Arizona is not Minnesota. There is this other reality, which is a reality of landscape.
I could name many women who travel or who work with America as a theme. I think it was more not being able to name canonical women, whose work is part of the American canon.
Painting is the chance to create a different space, or different way of picturing a literal stream of images.
There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.
One of the reasons I work serially, but also one of the reasons that I try to claim space in painting, is I'm desperately interested in asking: How can a group of images, or even two images, have meaning together?
We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it.
Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.
Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.
