Origin Stories, 2019
By mixing a little bit of the same color paint into two different colors, you can relate these two colors to one another and open a metaphorical dialogue between them. Every time I nearly ran out of paint, I added new dollops of bottled paint and continued the mixing process, creating generations of paint. As I mixed more paint related to the same ancestors and prepped more boards, I created families of paintings. Like all families, their relationships are loaded with dissonant feelings: love, hate, need, anger, want, longing, hurt, fear, aggression, desperation, envy, comfort, aversion, closeness.
Origin stories are tales of creation that explain how a reality came to be; by using paint mixing to embed my materials with the deep and complex ambivalence in relationships, I built a frame to experientially work within to enact, process, and reorganize my familiar troublesome experiences.
Origin Stories is an edited collection from this larger “genealogy project” I started in January 2019 studying five central families: Early Experience, Relationship, Interference, Body, and Earth.
