in her own words_

My new works on colored papers examine the materiality of color as both substrate and applied to the surface. In these works color is confirmed as material both in the colored paper and in the paint applied to the surface of the colored paper.

The title of the exhibition, Naked Color, is informed by my readings in philosophy, particularly the writings of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), the philosophy of flesh and the coextensiveness of our bodies with all that surrounds us.  The "naked" of the title also refers to the raw quality of paint application in my work.  Maurice Blondel's Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (1893) is also a major influence on my thought - not as reference to "action painting" but as reference to the inescapable decision each of us must make - to act or not act in this life.  In addidion to the theoretical/conceptual/historical positioning of my work, especially as it relates to phenomenology, I have a strong interest in color and in the colorist tradition as it extends back to the great Western European painters of Venice.  My use of intense and unusual color is at once beautiful, off-key, and borderline psychedelic.  Much of my practice is founded on the play of depth and surface, seriousness and frivolity.

In each of these works, I use one paint color that is a match or near-match to the paper color—producing a conceptual and visual tension as to whether the color one is seeing is the color applied to the surface as paint or the color inhering in the paper.  There is a visual and conceptual fluctuation of the color as painted (super) or unpainted (sub).  There is also a constant addressing of the edge and the shape of the paper substrate in these works—such that the proportions of the paper sheet optically change depending on how the edge is addressed—resulting in the paper sheet becoming a visually transformed.

The Fabriano Tiziano paper itself is crammed with historical references.  The Fabriano paper mill was founded in 1264 in Fabriano Italy.  The great Venetian painters, of whom Titian or Tiziano Vecellio is the greatest, are of particular importance to me and the name of the paper used for these works adds another layer of reference to this great painterly tradition.  My relation to paper is addressed in these works, underpinned by my understanding of both longevity and ephemerality of paper as the common substrate for a range of both unique and reproduced works extending along the visual and intellectual spectrum from paintings, as in this exhibition, to drawings, prints, printed photographs, and illustrated and printed books, to notes scribbled on a scrap.