CRAFTING THE PERCEPTUAL EVENT
By

Christann Kennedy

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS
in

VISUAL ART
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2015

©Christann Kennedy

ABSTRACT

This thesis project is a material inquiry into the perceptual consequences of colour, pattern and
shape, as well as a personal investigation of the terms of Western abstraction. In this paper, I will
describe and contextualize three bodies of studio work I have developed during my time as a
graduate student. I will articulate how these projects reanimate certain Modernist tropes,
especially the concepts of non-objective form and colour-as-subject. I will also link my works to
an additional set of concerns, which include the spatio-temporal implications of modular
structure and three-dimensional form, and the significance of labour-intensive material craft in
the digital age.
Stripe Set is a series of painted canvases with the same composition but different colour palettes.
As a modular work, this project can be reconfigured in response to architectural situations and
opportunities of exhibition context. It queries notions of originality and multiplicity while
delivering an experience of chromatic intensity that calls a viewer’s attention to their embodied
situation. The Polychrome Lozenges are a series of serigraphs on cotton paper that explore the
boundary between object and image while paying homage to the history of striped painting
within the 20th century canon. The Intermedial Experiments are a collection of works made from
wood and fibreboard that blend combinations of drawing, painting and sculpture to generate
instances of perceptual surprise. In addition to coming off the wall into literal space, these pieces
mark a significant shift as they depart from arbitrary colour palettes to consider how specifically
sourced colours can link abstract artworks to our everyday perceptual experiences.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT…………………………….....………………………………………..……....................................................................i
TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………….………………..ii
LIST OF FIGURES…....……………………………………………………………………………..…………………...…………...iii
QUOTATIONS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iv
1

2

3

CHAPTER ONE……………………………………………………………………...…………………….……….………..1
1.1

Introduction……………………………...…………………………………………………………….…………1

1.2

The Inception of Stripe Set………………………………………………………………………….…….…2

1.3

Installation and the Perceptual Event…………………………………………………………….....…6

1.4

Repetition and Change………………….....………………………………………………...……...….…….7

1.5

Art Historical Relations…..……………………….......………………………………….…………..……11

1.6

Subversive Devotion: Touch and Time……………………….........................……..…….………..16

CHAPTER TWO…………………………………....…………....……………………………………….………….……20
2.1

Repetitive Labour and the Polychrome Lozenges………………...…………………….....……20

2.2

The Element of Surprize…………………….…………………………………………..…..……..………23

2.3

A Methodological Kinship…………………………….…………………………..……………………….25

CHAPTER THREE……………………………………………………………………………………………..…….……28
3.1

Intermedial Experiments………………………………………………………..……………..……….…..28

3.2

Sourced Palettes……………………………………………………….……...................................….……32

3.3

Tasty Colours…………………………………………………………………………………………….………39

3.4

Conclusions and Reflections….…………………………………………………...………………..…….42

WORKS CITED………..……………………..…………………………………………………………………………….…………43
WORKS CONSULTED………………..……..……………………………………………………………..………………………45

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: Stripe Set, 2014………………………………………..…..……………….………………..………………….…………3
Fig. 2: Stripe Set Variation (way out)……………...……………………………..……………...….………………………4
Fig. 3: Stripe Set Variation (horizontal lattice)………………...……………………….…………………..……………5
Fig. 4: Stripe Set Variation (right left right)……………………………………………………….…….…………………10
Fig. 5: Stripe Set Diptych (twilight spicy intersection).……...……………………...……………………..………..13
Fig. 6: Stripe Set Diptych (citrus candy diamond)………………………….…..………………………………..……14
Fig. 7: Stripe Set Panel #19 (detail)…..………………………………………………………..….………………………..19
Fig. 8: Polychrome Lozenges in the studio………..…………………..………….……………..………………………22
Fig. 9: Polychrome Lozenges………………………..…………..……..………..…………………………….………….……24
Fig. 10: Polychrome Lozenges (detail)………………….………..………………..…………….……………………….…27
Fig. 11: Loop……..…………..…………………..……………………...……………………………………………………………29
Fig. 12: School Wall in Barra de Navidad…………...……..…….…………………...……………………………………34
Fig. 13: Untitled (Reclining Lozenge).………………….…..………………………...………………….………………….35
Fig. 14: Café Tablecloth in Barra de Navidad…………..…………………………………………….……..……………36
Fig .15: Stripey Loop………………………………….………….…..………………………………………….…………………37
Fig. 16: Tasty Colours……………….………………………….…..………………………………………….…….……………40
Fig. 17: Arrangement of Tasty Colours………………….…..…………………………….…………….…………………40
Fig. 18: Arrangement of Tasty Colours…………………………...…………………………………….……….…………40

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Colour is, first, a sensory event. Colours are true sensations, not abstractions or ideas.
-Linda Holtzchue

The same colour in two different contexts is not the same colour…This means that the
identity of a color does not reside in the color itself but is established by relation.
-Rudolf Arnheim

We might say that pigment is that motion spontaneously produced by substance in
conjunction with light…This is the pharmakon: an indiscrete threshold where our bodies
exchange information with an environment.
-The Office for Soft Architecture

A Small Theory: People observe the colours of the day only at its beginnings and ends,
but to me it’s quite that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations,
with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours…
In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.
-Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
My work is primarily a material inquiry into the perceptual consequences of colour, pattern and
shape. In the studio, I employ quasi-scientific procedures to test combinations of these elements,
always seeking a kind of optical density, or perceptual charge that is difficult to describe but easy
to recognize when I am successful in finding it. In support of this studio work, I pay close
attention to the interactions of colours and shapes in everyday life, always looking for
opportunities to translate and amplify ordinary experiences into abstract artworks.
Examined through a slightly different lens, my practice can also be understood as a personal
investigation of the terms of historical abstraction, as my work reanimates certain Modernist
tropes, especially the concepts of non-objective form and colour-as-subject. I am interested in
working through these ideas in order to pay homage to the canon of 20th century abstract
painting while simultaneously reconsidering the conceits associated with the tradition.
In the pages that follow, I will describe and analyze three bodies of studio work I have created,
tested and exhibited through the MAA program. I will situate all three projects in within an art
historical context, consider some of the philosophical and theoretical questions they have raised,
and delve into issues around material process, for as the French-born art historian and critic YveAlain Bois has argued, “the specificity of the object involves not just the general condition of its
medium, but also its means of production in its slightest detail” (xix). Where they illuminate how
my work has developed during this period of graduate study, I will also include some of my own
thoughts and reflections, for as I have followed my curiosity to explore the methods, materials
and art historical contexts that most interest me, I have also found myself on a journey of
personal discovery.
In her book The Infinite Line: Remaking Art After Modernism, the British art historian Briony Fer
argues that the break between Modern and Postmodern approaches to artistic production can be
understood as a shift between a collage aesthetic and a serial one (2). Of particular interest to

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Fer is the idea that serial artworks “open onto different temporalities” and “dramatize the
temporal through animating and transforming the most everyday and routine habits of looking”
(3). Ideas around seriality, temporality and everyday perception will be relevant to the
discussion of my MAA artwork, for while colour has been at the core of my practice for several
years, the operations of repetition and change, along with the spatio-temporal implications of
modular structure and three-dimensional form, have only recently emerged as important,
thereby expanding and transforming my way of working and of thinking about my work.
The Inception of Stripe Set
I began to work on the Stripe Set project in the fall of 2013. Initially, I was looking for a way to
explore the perceptual effects of various colour combinations while also questioning the notion
that artworks must be innovative in order to be worth making. In order to explore these ideas, I
began to make a set of oil paintings on canvas with the same composition but different colour
palettes. According to my initial logic, by painting a large number of panels that were neither the
same nor different, I could complicate the binary opposition between terms like 'original' and
'derivative' while providing myself with a quasi-scientific procedure to compare how different
colour combinations work to generate optical effects and evoke other kinds of subjective
response. As the work progressed, I became aware that ideas around embodied perception and
labour-intensive material craft would also become germane to the project.
In terms of composition, the paintings of the Stripe Set series are reductive and geometric. Each
panel features a sideways chevron superimposed against a ground of optically active stripes.
However, the collection actually divides into two groups, as half of the chevrons point to the right
and the other half point to the left, which makes it possible for any opposing pair to be hung as a
bilaterally symmetrical diptych. This reflective doubling begins the work of knitting individual
units of the group together into larger wholes, for depending upon which left-to-right order is
chosen, a diptych can feature either an “X” shape or a striped diamond. Furthermore, when a
larger group of panels are brought together, these “X”s and diamonds activate as alternating
motifs that connect, like links on a chain, to form a repeating pattern that flows through the
entire group.

2

Fig. 1: Stripe Set, 2014. Oil on canvas, 14 panels, 24 x 20 inches each.
Installation, Concourse Gallery, Emily Carr University.

3

As a collection of modular units, this work can be configured to respond to different architectural
situations or to generate a chosen perceptual effect. For example, a large grid hung at eye level
will address a viewer differently than a linear arrangement along a corridor, as the operations of
time and embodied perception will be distinct in each case. In my estimation, the distributed
installation of a serial work like Stripe Set offers a viewing experience that has much in common
with our everyday habits of looking, as we move around and assimilate a sequential collection of
partial views.

Fig. 2: Stripe Set Variation (way out), 2014 – 2015. Oil on canvas, multiple panels,
24 x 20 inches each. Installation, Landing Gallery, Emily Carr University.

Significantly, this implies a different temporal rhythm than the “Modernist” viewing paradigm as
championed by the American critic Clement Greenberg, who argued that a painting should be
received instantaneously as a pictorial force that strikes the viewer “all at once, like a sudden
revelation” (Greenberg 81). Stripe Set resists this kind of viewing and is geared towards a
durational encounter, for even when installed in a tight grid formation, the interplay of repetition
and variation in the work invites the viewer to “wander around”1 in a series of visual cuts and
dislocations that allow for comparisons to be made between the individual panels.
1 The British psychologist and painter David Maclagan has characterized the process of visually “wandering around”

in a painting as an oscillation between global and local takes, which has been experimentally demonstrated to
involve “a complex set of saccadic eye movements” (36).

4

Fig. 3: Stripe Set Variation (horizontal lattice), 2014 – 15. Oil on canvas, 12 panels,
20 x 24 inches each. Installation, Landing Gallery, Emily Carr University.

In the early stages of the project's development, I was interested in creating a modular work that
could be differently arranged, much like the tiles in a building project or the units of fabric in a
patchwork quilt. While I continue to appreciate the work’s resonance with such non fine art
sources, the more interesting theoretical implications of a modular structure did not really dawn
on me until I was completing the first eight panels of the series in the spring of 2014. Today, as
the paintings continue to accrue, the in-built flexibility of the project has emerged for me as its
most interesting facet.

5

Installation and the Perceptual Event
Significantly, the modular structure of the Stripe Set project demands that each permutation of
the work remain hypothetical until it has been placed in a spatial context, where it relies upon
the presence of a viewer to actualize it. Considered in this way, Stripe Set does not really become
'operational' until it has been sited, at which point the opportunity emerges for an opticalcorporeal event to take place between the work and a viewer. During the summer of 2015, I
explored the variable installation potential of Stripe Set by hanging ten different configurations of
the work at Emily Carr University during the Month of July. This experiment allowed me to test
my experience of the paintings removed from the site of their making in the studio and receive
feedback from people who viewed them in a range of different configurations. Viewer responses
to this experiment confirmed my assertion that each arrangement of the canvases can be
considered the potential site of a distinctive perceptual event, as several people commented upon
how much the work changed with each new installation.
I am indebted to the British painter Bridget Riley (b. 1931) for introducing me to the idea that a
painting can be understood as the site of an event. She first wrote about this notion in 1965,
during the phase of her career when she was painting the black and white optically active
canvases that would make her famous. In an essay entitled “Perception is the Medium,” Riley
wrote, “I feel that my paintings have some affinity with happenings…I want the disturbance or
‘event’ to arise naturally, in visual terms, out of the inherent energies and characteristics of the
elements which I use” (90). This way of thinking about artworks is consistent with the claim
made by the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) that the presence of a viewer is
necessary to complete a work, as well as with arguments about the death of the author2 that have
permeated recent critical art discourse. However, by carefully considering the implications of
modular form, I have moved past a superficial understanding of such ideas3 to a position where I
would now argue that the work only occurs in time and space, at the moment when a viewer and
the material constituents of the piece open up to each other, at the moment of perception.
2 see Roland Barthes in Works Consulted.
3 My previous engagement with the idea of “the death of the author” was confined to the notion that artworks offer

multiple points of entry and are subject to individual interpretation, placing the construction of meaning with the
viewer rather than the artist. I feel that Stripe Set has allowed me to integrate a more sophisticated level of
understanding in relation to those arguments.

6

Of course, this claim can be made with reference to any artwork; however, I find it particularly
illuminating in my own case, because it helps to explain why I gravitate towards vibrant colour
and stimulating surface pattern. It now seems clear to me that I am primarily interested in
constituting perceptual events, for myself first and then for other viewers, and furthermore, that I
am curious to discover whether it is possible to produce events that cannot be comprehensively
explained or described through language. While this curiosity bears the mark of my impatience
with “the often-quoted post structuralist maxim that unless you can articulate something it does
not exist” (Meecham and Sheldon 4), I also have deeper, more personal reasons for being
interested in the question: I am driven by the desire to understand a type of perceptual
phenomenon that I experienced regularly as a child, and still occasionally do as an adult.
When this kind of experience occurs, I will momentarily slip into a state of visual acuity that can
transform an otherwise banal household object, for example, into a fascinating form-in-itself that
is replete with sensory information but void of meaning, as if I am getting a fleeting glimpse into
some fundamental quality of being. A key feature of this state of consciousness is the seeming
absence of language-based thought, as my mind will momentarily take a bread from its habitual
naming and evaluation, and I will find myself suspended for a few seconds in a state of presence
that is characterized by an intense level of sensory awareness. I am very curious about moments
of heightened attention such as these, perhaps because they are so difficult to capture in verbal
terms, as if they contain a sensorial excess that can only spill over the rim of a semiotic code. In
my work, I am interested in trying to generate optical-corporeal events that have something in
common with these curious perceptual experiences in my life.

Repetition and Change
I remember the first time I heard a poem by the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946).
As an undergraduate in an art history class, I was listening to a colleague present a paper about a
connection between Stein's literary style and the painting methods of the French PostImpressionist Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906). As students of modern art history may recall, rather
than adhering to the academic convention of favouring the figure over the ground, Cézanne

7

aspired to treat every inch of his canvas with equal attention. According to my classmate, under
the influence of Cézanne, Stein went on to develop a literary version of the same idea by
composing texts that she conceived as distributed fields of equally important elements. Although
my classmate’s argument was well developed, her talk left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied, as
the ‘field’ metaphor had failed to account for how the experience of listening to Stein’s poem had
affected my consciousness.
I remember that I found the poem annoying at the start, with its seemingly nonsensical repetition
of words and phrases. However, after a few moments, something started to change. As the
speaker paused for breath between phrases, I began to notice my own breath, and then I became
aware that the rhythmic singsong string of words was subject to slight changes from one line to
the next, as if the poem's incremental advance was achieved by looping back through versions of
itself that were not exact repetitions, but rather subtle gestures that disclosed a little more with
each return of the motif, until at last a kernel of truth could be revealed at the heart of the work. I
left the classroom feeling I had just learned something profound about the fundamental nature of
consciousness as it arises in time. Looking back on this important early encounter, it now seems
to me that Stein’s text could have been more aptly described by a metaphor that could articulate
its potency as an emergent series of durational events, bound together by the interplay of
repetition and change.

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is
reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the
evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling.
In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is
mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling
there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence...
-Gertrude Stein4

4 This excerpt is taken from Tender Buttons. See Works Cited.

8

I think this idea has something useful to contribute to a discussion of Stripe Set, for I believe that
by repeating the same composition throughout the series, I am calling attention to the play of
difference between the various palettes while engineering a situation where a viewer can
encounter the panels as a durational sequence of perceptual events. Furthermore, I think the
repetitive structure of the work makes the tacit argument that the project will not really be
complete until as many panels have been painted as there are possible combinations of visible
colours. With five colours per panel, and at least 100,000 distinct colours visible to the human
eye,5 that is a lot of potential iterations.
It is this vast potential for variation within already established parameters that I find most
intriguing about the Stripe Set project. According to Fer, “The idea of infinity itself presupposes
an incomplete subject, and the work of repetition marks the impossibility of completion” (58).
For me, Stripe Set holds the potential to resist closure indefinitely, and although I have yet to
come fully to terms with why I find this idea so compelling, I suspect that by producing
collections of non-identical multiples, I am working through the question materially in order to
figure it out philosophically.

5 According to David J. Calkins, director of research at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, “The

tremendous variability in the spectral composition of light reflected from surfaces lends itself to eliciting a gamut of
more than 100,000 discriminable colours, and the variation in the names we assign these colours is limited only by
scope of human experience.” See “Mapping Colour Perception to a Physiological Substrate.” The Visual
Neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.

9

Fig. 4: Stripe Set Variation (right left right), 2014 – 15. Oil on canvas, 15 panels,
24 x 20 inches each. Installation, Landing Gallery, Emily Carr University.

10

Art Historical Relations

The visual and spatial operations of Stripe Set are available to any viewer, regardless of art
historical background. However, there are levels of context that may become available to a more
informed viewer, since the project resonates with a variety of works in the tradition of hardedged abstraction, as well as with several 1960s art movements6, including Colour Field Painting,
Pop Art and Op Art. While a thorough analysis of how this work aligns with and diverges from all
of the predominant themes of 20th century abstraction is outside the scope of this paper, a few
specific examples will begin to place Stripe Set within a field of art historical relations.
Particularly illuminating, I think, is the way the project intersects with the idea of non-objective
form that was advanced a century ago by the painters and poets of the Russian avant-garde.
According to the New York-based curator and art historian Masha Chlenova, in the first decades
of the 20th century a collective of composers, writers and artists dedicated themselves to
producing artistic form “as such” (200). Aligning themselves against the allegorical objectives of
the Symbolists who dominated the art world of their time and place, these radical thinkers
resolved to invent an art of the real, which for them meant creating autonomous forms,
emancipated from symbolic representation or any fixed connection to meaning (Chlenova 200).
Conversant in structural linguistics, these artists sought to liberate the signifier (unit of artistic
form) from the signified (conventional meaning) and to ground works in their material
components, which in painting were understood to be the fundamentals of colour, line and
surface texture (Chlenova 206).
The zaum7 poets of this group profoundly affected the thinking of the Russian painter Kasimir
Malevich (1879 – 1935). Velimir Khlebnikov (1885 – 1922) was particularly influential, with his
technique of fragmenting language into the basic units of sound, letter and word and then
recombining these units to create new forms, for according to zaum ideology, basic language
units were understood to possess their own direct, expressive power. Following this train of
6 Although I was not aware of them when I first composed the structure for the Stripe Set project, it has come to my

attention that the work carries a particularly strong reference to a series of “X” paintings produced by the American
artist Miriam Schapiro in the late 1960s.
7 Zaum is an abbreviation of the Russian word zaumnoe (transrational) (Foster et al. 689).

11

thought, Malevich developed a lexicon of simple geometric shapes that he combined through a
new style that he called zaum realism, and later, Suprematism (Chlenova 206).
Like the Suprematist paintings of Malevich, the panels of Stripe Set rely on a reductive formal
vocabulary of shapes that have been placed on the canvas with no referential content. Also like
Suprematist works, and unlike the arrangements of flat planes advanced by Greenberg's midcentury anti-illusionistic formalism,8 the pictorial elements of the project rely on a syntax of
figure and ground relationship.9 Whereas for Malevich, this meant arranging his units of
geometric form in a field of white conceived as infinite space (Malevich 293), I compose each
Stripe Set panel by suspending a chevron figure against a continuous field of alternating stripes.
Moreover, in my composition, as both stripes and chevron appear to extend beyond the frame,
the image can be read as the cropped fragment of a larger system, perhaps like the language
fragments zaum poets liked to isolate and rearrange in their writings. Pushing this argument a
little further, I will suggest that when a group of panels are brought together, they link up in a
repetitive configuration of letter or sign-like elements that fail to coalesce as actual words and
must therefore rely on the expressive force of their formal qualities, which include line, surface
texture and, above all, colour.

8 Greenberg famously theorized that the self-critical impulse of Modernism required that each artistic discipline

confine itself to using only the characteristics specific to that discipline. In the case of painting, he argued that the
fundamental characteristic was that of two-dimensional “flatness.” See “The Case for Abstract Art” in Works Cited.
9 The vocabulary of figure/ground relationships is derived from gestalt theory, which has come to me through the
seminal works on visual perception by the German-born psychologist and film theorist, Rudolf Arnheim. See Works
Consulted.

12

Fig. 5: Stripe Set Diptych (twilight spicy intersection), 2014. Oil on canvas, 24 x 40 ¼ inches.

So far I have only touched upon the issue of colour in Stripe Set. The next art historical reference
will begin to fill this gap, as the project owes much to the working methods of the German-born
American “empirical” colourist Joseph Albers (1888 – 1976). In my view, Albers is responsible
for one of the most important colour-oriented projects of the 20th century, a series of hundreds of
paintings and silkscreen prints executed between 1950 and 1976 under the title Homage to the
Square (Gage 264). These works repeat a very similar, reductive composition of hard-edged
nesting squares in a variety of palettes which, in spite of what one might assume, do not rely
upon a pre-established system of colour theory (Gage 265). In fact, in his seminal text The
Interaction of Color, Albers argued that the perceptual relativity of colour renders any rational
system of colour harmony inadequate to the needs of the artist (1). Instead, he stressed the
importance of empirical experiments that, with time and repetition, enable the student to
develop “an eye for colour” (1).

13

Aside from the obvious repetition of a single composition in a manifold of palettes, there are
aspects of Albers' project that resonate strongly with Stripe Set. Firstly, the emphasis Albers
placed upon an experimental method that involves the application of trial and error is consistent
with my objectives for the production side of my project. Furthermore, as did Albers with the
many iterations of Homage to the Square, I compose the palettes of each Stripe Set panel
individually, focusing on internal colour relationships.
I begin with an arbitrary background colour and then select a contrasting colour for the stripes.
The next step will be to anticipate a third colour for the chevron, keeping in mind that I need to
find the 'right' balance between hue, value and saturation if I wish to enliven the stripe colours,
but not clash with them. Through these choices, I endeavor to strike a note between visual
intensity and discomfort, so that the work will attract attention but also sustain a durational
viewing engagement so that certain perceptual effects will be given time to occur.

Fig. 6: Stripe Set Diptych (citrus candy diamond), 2014. Oil on canvas, 24 x 40 ¼ inches.

14

While there are several points of similarity between Stripe Set and Homage to the Square, the two
projects are also very different from each other. Perhaps most obviously, Albers did not conceive
of his paintings as units of a modular composite, unlike the panels that I composed specifically to
form a repeating pattern. Another major distinction lies in the more fluid borders between
colours in Stripe Set, which reveal a different sensibility than the perfectly straight lines we have
come to expect from works in the tradition of hard-edged abstraction. Instead, my stripes
demonstrate a handmade wonkiness that not only contributes to their optical action, but also
signals to an informed viewer that the work is not meant to be taken too seriously. The playful
quasi-psychedelic wiggle of Dr. Seuss-esque stripes conveys a sense of informality, which is
underscored by the prevalence in the work of cheerful colours like orange, turquoise and lime
green. In my estimation, these choices imbue Stripe Set with a playful “Pop” sensibility, calling to
mind the palettes we might expect to find in cartoons, in fashion and in interior décor, while the
modular building block structure keeps the project from feeling over-determined or austere, for
as one viewer has commented, “it seems a lot friendlier than it would if it was all in one piece.”10
I think any ambitious artist working in abstraction today must be aware that they are placing
their work in dialogue with a tradition that has been characterized by manifestos and lofty
rhetorical claims. For example, the artists and thinkers of the Russian avant-garde believed they
could advance social revolution through their non-objective works,11 while for Piet Mondrian
(1872 – 1944) and his de Stihl associates, the goal was to purify and essentialize the arts,
especially painting and architecture, in order to blend them into a single form and instigate a new
utopia (Foster et al. 151). Later, as objectives shifted from collective to individual, the painters
associated with the mid-century New York School were tireless, if we believe the critics who
wrote about them, in the pursuit of subjective transcendence and the “self-aggrandizing heroic
gesture” (Verwoert 95). Coming along in the wake of such histories, I have found it important to
temper my preoccupation with the kind of perceptual intensity I have already described with a
healthy dose of irreverence. As I hope I have begun to demonstrate, my objectives are humbler
and more lighthearted than those professed by the pioneers of Western abstraction, as I do not
10 The Canadian artist and educator Germaine Koh made this comment in July 2014, during the critique of a Stripe

Set iteration that I exhibited in the ECUAD Low Residency MAA Exhibition, Fragments of a Former Moon.
11 For example, according to art historian Masha Chlenova, the impulse to ground artistic form in its material
properties was proposed as “a tool for an active, even aggressive intervention into everyday life, which they aimed to
turn into a more dynamic and immediate experience” (200).

15

seek to place them theoretically within a spectrum of revolutionary ideals or applied social
critique.
Perhaps most significant to the discussion of how Stripe Set departs from Modernist themes is the
way the work's modular structure resonates with the serial strategies of Minimalism and Pop Art.
Of special interest to me is the way the project embraces the idea of multiples, but still departs
from the mechanical modes of production favoured by artists like Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.
Instead, Stripe Set relies upon a carefully hand-painted aesthetic that, while resisting designation
as either mechanical or expressive, preserves a record of the touch and time that have gone into
its production. I would argue that this work asks us to consider the contemporary implications of
multiplicity, for if the artists we know as Minimalists adopted seriality in the 1960s to critique
the subjective and gestural excesses of Abstract Expressionism (Colpitt 17), and Pop artists used
similar means to reflect upon the post-war proliferation of media images and commodity forms
(Hopkins 115), what does it mean to make a serial work today, slowly and carefully by hand?
Subversive Devotion: Touch and Time
In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German critic
and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) famously argued that a singular work of art
could be distinguished from a reproduction by virtue of the “aura” surrounding the original
(218). For Benjamin, although mechanical reproduction emancipated artworks from their
traditional role as ritual objects, enabling them to reach mass audiences and enter the realm of
politics, these changes could only be achieved at the expense of their “aura,” with its associated
concept of authenticity as made manifest by the artwork's “presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 220). Furthermore, Benjamin argued
that the work of art's unique existence must include “the history to which it was subject
throughout the time of its existence” and “the changes it may have suffered in physical condition
over the years as well as the various changes in ownership” (220).
I am very interested in the notion that an object is surrounded by the “aura” of its unique
presence, which, having been set in motion by its mode of production and other histories, is able

16

to crystallize at the moment when the object is encountered by a conscious perceiver. I would
argue that a handmade object can deliver a particularly rich encounter in this regard, because it
carries the trace of the maker's presence and touch. In an age when technological reproduction
has expanded beyond what Benjamin could have even imagined to encompass screen-based
images and other modes of digital proliferation, I am very interested in the implications of the
handmade. While I confess to an affection for traditional methods of craft, my real interest in
such matters is not driven by a romantic notion about the artist's unique subjectivity or the
inherent value of an 'authentic' mark. Instead, I am beguiled by the notion that at this particular
moment in history, there is something subversive, absurd, and sensually self-indulgent about
taking the time to make something by hand that could be more efficiently and perhaps 'better'
made through some combination of mechanical and digital means.
Like most of my paintings, the panels of the Stripe Set project are made very slowly and carefully
over the course of several months, one colour at a time with drying time between layers. In
speaking about his career-long engagement with the monochrome, the Canadian artist and art
historian Ian Wallace has described painting as “the landing pad of subjectivity” because the
application of pigment to a surface can be understood as the indexical trace of the artist's
subjective presence (Wallace). Taking this formulation a little further, I would like to suggest
that when my layering process is taken into account, Stripe Set panels reveal themselves as
registers of a sedimentary presence, as the most recently-painted elements lie on top of earlier
layers, which can be examined in sequence as if moving backwards in time until the original
ground colours are reached. Further, when we think about these paintings as material records of
touch and attention, the nature of the mark I use to make them also emerges as significant.
When Jasper Johns (b. 1930) began to work in encaustic in the 1950s,12 he was declaring a
position against the gestural excesses of Abstract Expressionism, ironically using a thick wax
medium to slow down, reify and impersonalize even the smallest stroke of his brush (Foster et al.
404). In a sense, my methods have something in common with the impulse behind Johns'

12 It is worth noting that Johns was also embedding printed materials into many of his encaustic paintings, thereby

simultaneously inserting and hiding fragments of language. For the same of my current argument, I have focused on
the artist’s position in relation to painterly expressionism, however, the matter of hidden content in Johns’ work is a
worthy topic of research in its own right.

17

encaustic, for my paint handling is both slower and less autographic than anything we might
associate with Expressionism.
Over the years, I have developed techniques to lay down slow, smooth bands of colour that reveal
a handmade sensibility only along their borders, where I encourage an overloaded brush to trail
a ridge of paint to serve as a haptic trace of the work's material history. Although I have less
control than I might prefer over how this handling of material will be interpreted by others, I like
to believe that by employing this manner of gestural restraint, I am decreasing the odds that my
work will be read through the lens of a painterly flourish. While I am deeply involved in the
implications of the handmade, I am also motivated to eschew the kind of subjective mark that
conjures up ideas about self-expression, because for me the trace of the hand is a lot more
interesting when it resists this cliché and functions instead as a humble record of lived presence,
repetitive touch, and the passage of time.
Although vibrant colours and optical effects may be the first things to strike a viewer of Stripe Set,
it is my hope that the temporal layering and caressive facture of each panel will invite a
thoughtful viewer to spend a few moments considering how these paintings were made, for as
the British painter and psychologist David Maclagan has argued, “the actual aesthetic features of
a painting – such as its pressure of line, density of colour, coherence or incoherence of form –
have their own independent psychological contribution to make” (8). While I maintain that the
irregular stripes and building-block structure convey a lighthearted sensibility that keep the
work from feeling overly austere, I would also like to suggest that the careful, sensual handling of
material signals a tactile and repetitive practice that borders on the devotional. If I have done my
job well, the work will be able to hold the seeming opposites of playful experiment and
devotional touch in a productive tension that can be apprehended not only by myself as the
maker, but also by a viewer who is willing to take a closer look.

18

Fig. 7: Stripe Set Panel #19 (detail), 2015. Oil on canvas.

19

CHAPTER TWO
Repetitive Labour and the Polychrome Lozenges
As I have said, my intention at the beginning of the Stripe Set project was to engage in an
extended colour experiment, however, as the panels started to accumulate, other concerns began
to emerge as significant. The issue of repetitive labour was one such concern, as while I was
making the paintings, I began to think about other additive processes that could highlight colour
relationships, which led me to question whether the brush was actually central to my project as
an artist. In order to investigate this question, in the fall of 2014, I went to work in the
printmaking studio and produced a set of non-identical multiples under the title Polychrome
Lozenges.
I had only minimal printmaking experience before I initiated this project, but I was aware that my
favourite method of placing flat planes of oil paint with drying time between layers had a lot in
common with serigraphy. Mindful of this parallel, I set out to revisit the border zone between
originality and multiplicity I had been exploring through Stripe Set, this time through silkscreen
printing, a medium that is conventionally used to produce identical multiples. I was eager to
transgress the ethos of identical mass production that is traditional to printmaking, much as I had
been transgressing the ethos of unique originality that is traditional to painting. Also, on a
personal level, by taking a strategy I had developed in paint and adapting it to print, I hoped to
discover a bit more about the impulses behind my work. I wondered, would removing the
vestiges of painterly facture make this project feel unrelated to the rest of my work?
Arguably, a serigraph or silkscreen print sits somewhere on a continuum between the handmade
and the mechanically reproduced image. In my view, serigraphy has much in common with
painting, as both mediums employ manual tools to apply pigmented fluid to a surface. However,
a printed image is typically less spontaneous than a painting, as by the time the printer begins to
apply colour to a surface, all of the decisions involved in layout have already been made. In order
to disturb this expectation and leave room for unscripted decisions at every stage, I planned a
simple composition that would allow me to improvise adjustments throughout the printing

20

process. Furthermore, in planning the composition for this project, I wanted to create a series of
works that could serve as an idiosyncratic homage to the various histories of striped painting
within the 20th century canon,13 and so I paired the lozenge shape, which has been a recurring
motif in my paintings, with a pattern of continuous stripes.
In order to execute the striped design, I created two screens with simple rectangular openings,
one wider than the other, and proceeded to print these shapes onto heavy cotton paper, using an
additive process that allowed me to spontaneously decide whether or not to produce a third
colour by overlapping the edges of any two adjacent hues. As the work progressed, it quickly
became apparent that I could open up an additional avenue for surprise by manipulating the
levels of transparency and opacity of my inks, which made it difficult to predict exactly how the
colours would mix in the margins of overlap. Also, my composition allowed me to vary the
widths of my stripes to complicate the tempo of the visual rhythm14 and create sensations of
expansion and compression between these repeating elements. While the high level of
mechanical control involved in the serigraphy process make it possible to generate identical
stripes and identical prints, I ended up using the screens to generate a large series of quite
differently-striped monoprints.

13 I am particularly interested in the works of the Quebec-Canadian painter and Plasticien Guido Molinari, the Op Art

paintings of the British artist Bridget Riley, the Colour Field paintings of the American artists Gene Davis and
Kenneth Noland, and the striped works associated with institutional critique by the French artist Daniel Buren.
14 According to the British design writer Alan Pipes, “visual rhythm is created by the movement of the viewer’s eyes
across and around a composition, taking in the repetition of elements that have been placed with some kind of
structured variation” (244).

21

Fig. 8: Polychrome Lozenges in the studio, 2014. Silkscreen ink on cotton paper, 20 x 9 inches each.

It bears mention that silkscreen technique requires the repetition of simple a simple gesture, for
it is the printer's task to pull ink through a screen in order to bring pigment into contact with a
surface. During the process of applying stripes to the paper that would become the Lozenges, I
noticed that each enactment of this gesture was being recorded by the appearance of a single
coloured rectangle, and as I worked to lay these shapes down one by one into the hundreds, I
remembered Ian Wallace15 and began to think of each rectangle as an index of presence and
attention. Following this daydream a little further, I began to think about additive process as
analogous to the accretion of memories, as we layer new experiences over the old, sometimes
overlapping only along the margins and sometimes obscuring all but a trace of the past. While I
would not expect these musings to make it across to a viewer of the Polychrome Lozenges, I
mention them here because they signaled the emergence of something new in my thinking about
the operations of memory within my work. These thoughts would contribute to the development
of my Intermedial Experiments a few months later.
15 See page 16 of this text.

22

The Element of Surprise

There was a big surprise in the process of making the Polychrome Lozenges. Because the
composition involved large areas of flat colour, often with several layers of overlapping ink, the
paper began to curl under the exposure to so much water-based colour, and when I began to cut
the white background away from the Lozenges, this effect became more pronounced. At first this
situation appeared to be a serious technical problem; however, upon reflection, I was able to
recognize the surprise of the curling paper as one of the more interesting aspects of these prints
as physical objects. In my estimation, as concave planar forms with striped interiors, these works
are now open to a range of associations, depending upon how they are viewed.

For example, if exhibited vertically, a Polychrome Lozenge will curl playfully away from the plane,
as if trying to sneak off the wall and escape the restrictions of a two-dimensional existence. If
placed on a horizontal surface, the same printed object will begin to resemble a vessel that
contains colours, rather than a surface that merely supports them. This unexpected element
becomes more pronounced when the Lozenges are viewed from an oblique angle, as the roll of
the paper will cause the stripes to appear as curves that slowly straighten out as a viewer
approaches the customary position in front of the work. Perhaps most exciting to me at the
moment, this element of perceptual surprise can be compounded and intensified by the decision
to join a collection of these works together like a chain of concave paper dolls, for under these
conditions the Lozenges will form a line with peaks and troughs that occur at regular intervals
like a rhythmic succession of multicoloured cresting waves.

23

Fig. 9: Polychrome Lozenges, 2015. Silkscreen ink on cut paper, 9 pieces, 20 x 9 inches each.
Installation, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University. Photo: Scott Massey.

I think of the Polychrome Lozenges as a playful counterpoint to the self-serious attitudes that are
typically linked with historical works of abstract painting. When this piece was exhibited in the
Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, I received feedback that the shapes resemble
something familiar from the everyday world, which is itself a transgression of the Formalist ideal
that abstract works should operate as autonomous self-referential forms with no suggestion of
representational content.16 Apparently, for some viewers, the shapes resemble skateboards, or
artificial fingernails, or medication capsules, which are not the kinds of associations we tend to
connect with ‘serious’ works of formal abstraction. It has also been suggested that the vibrant
colour and optical activity of the work carry a reference to psychedelic drugs and altered states of
consciousness, which is a reading that I am happy to embrace. For me, the Lozenges also call to
mind ideas around bodily pleasure and desire, as they invite a kind of slippage with décor or even
high-end retail display, especially when exhibited on a stylish white table as in the image above.
In any event, for a series of static objects, the Polychrome Lozenges present a wealth of
16 See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” in Works Cited.

24

opportunities to generate a sense of movement. While this work resonates with any number of
contemporary projects under the banner of 'expanded painting,’17 I feel a particular kinship with
the process-heavy, pop-inflected installations of the American artist Polly Apfelbaum.

A Methodological Kinship

Apfelbaum has perhaps become best known for the works she refers to as fallen paintings, which
are highly coloured, floor-based installations made up of hundreds of individually cut and dyed
shapes in synthetic velvet.18 While these painting/sculpture hybrids have been much lauded for
their effectiveness in collapsing the boundaries of Modernist medium-specificity, it is the manner
in which Apfelbaum has fused reconfigurable installation with perceptual intensity and labourintensive process that I identify with most strongly.
As composite pieces made up of scores of repeating elements, Apfelbaum's fallen paintings have
the kind of flexible installation potential that has emerged as critically important in my most
recent projects. Like Stripe Set and the Polychrome Lozenges, Apfelbaum's works demonstrate
the capacity to respond to the architectural givens of different exhibition spaces. Furthermore,
they remain open to the vagaries of chance and spontaneous decision-making, since the artist
likes to place the individual units of her installations without the aid of a pre-established map.
She has said “My work is improvisational, intuitive, process oriented. I want to see every
possibility and then I'll make up my mind” (qtd. in Lloyd ar21). From this we can surmise that
the final siting of a piece has become integral to Apfelbaum's production logic, as her works
cannot be considered complete until every constituent element has been placed. Furthermore, in
the terms of figure and ground relationship, Apfelbaum's installations have effectively enlisted
whole galleries to operate as grounds for her (object) figures. This way of thinking has recently
captured my imagination, and I anticipate pushing this idea quite a bit further in future projects.

17 In his 2002 essay entitled “Where is Painting Now,” the Stockholm-based scholar and curator Daniel Birnbaum

has described the contemporary situation for painting as an expanded field wherein “painting no longer exists as a
strictly circumscribed mode of expression (because)…Painterly practices emerge in other genres, such as
photography, video, sculpture, printmaking and installation.” See Works Cited.
18 To view image examples of Apfelbaum’s fallen paintings and other works, please visit her professional website at
http://www.pollyapfelbaum.com.

25

In addition to their capacity to transform with each new exhibition, the multicoloured shapes of
Apfelbaum's fallen paintings also change in appearance as a viewer moves around, as the texture
of the velvet causes their colours to shimmer and shift according to the angle of incident light.
According to the Berlin-based art critic Martin Herbert, this optical instability contributes to the
interest of the work, as does the vibrancy of Apfelbaum's palette, which he has described as
“Matissean” (85). For the London-based art historian T. J. Demos, Apfelbaum's floor installations
unleash a “destabilizing force (as)…intense optical sensation and evidence of painterly process
dazzle the viewer” (176). In my view, Apfelbaum's work can be best articulated as a series of
elaborate and optically intense material experiments that decimate the boundaries between high
and low culture and, in keeping with one of the central aspirations I hold for my own work,
subvert the notion that art must be lofty and super-serious, as she makes her installations out of
shiny non-art materials and brings them literally 'down to earth' by placing them on the floor.19
I also understand Apfelbaum's work as a meditation on the tension between the moment of
inspiration when a new idea comes into view and the hours of steadfast labour that may be
required to bring a project into form, as she has said that she enjoys labour-intensive process and
“finds tedium liberating” (qtd. in Lloyd ar21). This level of devotion to material craft resonates
very strongly with a key methodological driver of my own work, for as I have already suggested, I
try to create objects that not only bear the trace of human touch, but also emit an undercurrent of
psychological tension that a viewer will notice if they consider the focused care and attention that
have gone into the production of the work. It might be more efficient to engineer perceptual
events between viewers and readymade or mechanically reproduced components. However, I
am committed to producing the handcrafted event because it not only activates the viewer's
perceptual faculties, but can also forge an asynchronous, tactile link between the artist's absent
body and the viewer's present one. This seems especially poignant to me today, as Western
culture continues to trend aggressively towards the instantaneous, the digital, and the virtual: I
find a subversive poetics of touch within the handmade work that I am interested in preserving.

19 Apfelbaum has referred to the floor as “an emotionally charged, low, irreverent space, a place where you throw

things, where you drop your dirty clothes.” Furthermore, she has acknowledged that “Something precious like an
artwork was not supposed to be on the floor” (qtd. in Marcoci, 42).

26

Fig. 10: Polychrome Lozenges (detail), 2015.
Silkscreen ink on cut paper, 20 x 9 inches each.

27

CHAPTER THREE
Intermedial Experiments
As I have described, during the process of making the first panels of the Stripe Set project, I began
to open my thinking to the spatial and temporal implications of seriality and modular structure.
Around this same time, I also started paying much closer attention to how perceptual events
occur in everyday life. I wondered whether an abstract vocabulary might be up to the task of
capturing the tenor of such events, in spite of the fact that historical abstraction has been linked
to the paradigm that autonomous artworks function in a different register than everyday life.
Before enrolling in graduate study, I had developed a procedure for gathering visual cues from
quotidian sources and combining them through memory and invention to create abstract
paintings. However, the idea to try transposing a single everyday perception onto a single work
of art did not emerge for me until my first year in the MAA program. In the winter of 2014, I
worked through this new idea by producing a body of works on paper that I framed as quirky and
subjective translations of everyday objects and scenes. These drawings and paintings allowed
me to explore the ways in which memory and imagination inflect our perceptions of things in the
world;20 however, I felt I had missed something important by failing to address how things
actually present themselves to our bodies at the instance of perception. It became clear that my
next series of experiments would involve working with three-dimensional form.
I made my first prototype for the Intermedial Experiments in the spring of 2014 when I created a
three-dimensional work entitled Loop. As a hybrid object comprised of a graphite wall drawing
connected to a planar “U” shape that hovers a few inches above the floor, this piece inserts itself
into literal space in a way that was quite new for my work at the time, as I had not yet made the
Polychrome Lozenges.

20 This is the central argument of my unpublished essay of 2014, entitled “The Creative Instance of Perception.”

28

Fig. 11: Loop, 2014. Acrylic paint on fibreboard with graphite wall drawing,
86 x 35 x 24 inches. Photo: Trevor van den Eynden.

When I started to work on this piece, I had been thinking about the definition of a painting as a
material object that exists in real space. This issue was of particular interest to me at the time
because I had been exploring the spatial and temporal implications of modular structure in
relation to Stripe Set while researching the history of Modernist abstraction.
29

As students of art history may recall, the development of abstract painting has been
characterized by instances when the pioneers of the genre aspired to represent spiritual realities
or to evoke states of transcendent ideality through their works. Wassily Kandinsky comes to
mind as one of the most fervent advocates for the metaphysical power of abstraction, as he
believed that letting go of the materialist impulse behind representation enabled artworks to
address viewers on a deeper level, thereby assisting them in their spiritual growth.21 As I
reflected upon this history, it seemed curious to me that so many of my predecessors in
abstraction had felt it possible to articulate non-physical ideals through a material form like
painting. Therefore, the impulse to create a work that resonated with these histories while
inserting itself as an overtly physical presence within the exhibition space captured my
imagination, and I decided to produce a graphite drawing that appeared to be in the process of
sliding off the wall into the room.
When the Minimalists began to make “specific objects”22 that occupied real, rather than
transcendent or illusionistic space in the 1960s, they were consciously assimilating the
operations of time and embodied perception into their works in a way that had been denied by
formalist criticism. In her discussion of the iconic 1965 work by the American artist Robert
Morris (b. 1931) called Untitled (L Beams), the American art historian Francis Colpitt has
highlighted the fact that “the configuration is perceptually altered as the spectator moves around
or between the elements…(as) relationships between spectator and object change” (95). As I was
making Loop, I considered the decision made by Morris to create sculptural works on a roughly
human scale in order to facilitate a one-to-one encounter between the viewer and the piece in
real space (Morris 831). I also considered the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica23 (1937 – 1980) who,
according to the Brazilian art historian Renato da Silva, had shared Morris’ interest in the
writings of the French philosopher and scholar Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961).
Apparently, both artists had been influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 book Phenomenology of
Perception to assemble planar materials as three-dimensional artworks that could interface with
embodied perceivers within the built environment (da Silva). I took inspiration from these

21 See Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art in Works Consulted
22 See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” in Works Consulted.
23 The paint colour I selected for Loop carries a direct homage to Oiticica, who favoured warm hues, especially

yellow and orange, for their capacity to advance towards the viewer (da Silva).

30

precedents. Moreover, my decision to complicate the boundaries between drawing, painting and
sculpture in the making of Loop was in part inspired by the Brazilian Neo-Concrete poet Ferreira
Gullar, who in dialogue with Oiticica theorized a special kind of object that could surpass
traditional artistic categories like painting and sculpture in order to provoke direct
phenomenological experience.24
Merleau-Ponty’s most influential contribution to the branch of philosophy known as
phenomenology was to locate the root of human subjectivity within the physical body itself, as he
argued that our experiences as conscious body-subjects encode all of our perceptions with an
underlying a priori structure. One of the central tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is the
contention that we understand objects in the world through a kind of “bodily intentionality” that
pre-consciously assesses how we might move through or utilize the spaces and things that we
encounter.25 I found some convincing evidence in support of this claim when I exhibited Loop in
the Concourse Gallery at Emily Carr University during the summer of 2014.
For one thing, the resemblance of the work to a sled or skateboard seems have captured the
imagination of more than one child, as I found it necessary to remove small footprints from the
surface of the piece on more than one occasion. I was also able to overhear a number of viewers
make reference to the work as a doorway or portal into another dimension, which I found very
encouraging, considering my original intention to connect Loop to concepts of transcendental
space as they had been expressed within historical abstraction. After this initial foray into threedimensional form, I found myself eager to make more painted objects, adopting the term
Intermedial to describe works that sit somewhere on a continuum between painting and
sculpture. I see this expansion of my practice as the next logical step in my research, as it follows
up on the capacity of Stripe Set to activate architectural space and call a viewer’s attention to
their embodied situation. The Intermedial Experiments also promise to advance my investigation
of strategies to create a work that can present itself to the body of a viewer as do ordinary things
in the world.

24 See Ferreira Gullar “The Theory of the Non-Object” in Works Cited.
25 In his introduction to the book Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, the British scholar and philosophy

professor Thomas Baldwin offers an accessible summary of these ideas. See Works Consulted.

31

Sourced Palettes
Aside from coming off the wall to share space with a viewer, the most recent Intermedial
Experiments mark another significant shift in my work, as I have started to explore the
implications of using sourced rather than arbitrary colour palettes. The Canadian artist Renée
Van Halm has been a particular influence in this regard, as she has developed a number of
projects over the years that blend her considerable skills as a colourist with research
methodologies that inflect her work with elements of social and political commentary.
Two projects in particular come to mind. The first of these, entitled Currencies, is a contemporary
interpretation of the Victorian custom of displaying ceramic plates as decorative accents. For this
project, Van Halm researched the history of colour trends in interior décor in order to identify
the most popular hues in each decade of the 20th century. She then applied these colours to a
series of semi-abstract disk shapes, noting that colours have a 'currency' that can make them
seem dated after a few years, thus stimulating the desire to redecorate.26 In a second project,
Van Halm sourced palettes for a series of gouache paintings of domestic interiors from the
magazine advertisements of expensive brands like Gucci and Armani in order to further explore
connections between colour and consumerism (Van Halm). She has said “We have this
relationship with colour that is somewhat subliminal, in that we like one fridge over another or
one article of clothing over another, and we attribute it to individuality...We are almost unable to
acknowledge how determined it is outside of ourselves” (qtd. in Laurence 61).
I have several ideas about how to inflect my own work with undercurrents of content by using
specifically sourced palettes, some of which I am currently developing, and some that I hope to
work with in the future. For example, for one current work in progress, I am using colours
derived from historical wallpapers in order to evoke a sense of nostalgia and link the piece with
ideas about domestic space. A second idea involves deriving palettes from my personal collection
of highly coloured Mexican tablecloths in order to explore David Batchelor's contention that
Western culture suffers from “chromaphobia”27 while simultaneously linking my gallery-based
26 For more on this project, see Bruce Grenville’s catalogue essay for the exhibition Weak Thought at the Vancouver

Art Gallery, November 14 1998 – January 31, 1999.
27 See Batchelor, David. Chromaphobia in Works Consulted.

32

work with everyday perceptual events. Perhaps most interesting to me at the moment, I am also
working with a series of my own photographs as a way to source colours.
As mentioned above, when I was employing additive process to print the Polychrome Lozenges, I
found myself in a daydream about the act of layering pigment as a metaphor for the layering of
remembered experiences, which led me to wonder whether it might be interesting to make a
series of painted works with colours imported directly from my own memories. For more than a
decade, I have been travelling back and forth to spend the winter months in Mexico, and as many
artists have noted before me, the quality of light near the equator is completely unlike that which
we experience in the Northern hemisphere. On the Pacific coast of Jalisco state, it has been my
observation that the influences of humidity and noise, not to mention the sheer ferocity of the
sun, have a way of blending into a phenomenological experience of the everyday that is quite
different from what we might typically expect in Vancouver. At the risk of bordering on the
esoteric, I will say that I have noticed an electricity, even a pulsation, to the way colours look and
feel on a hot day in the tropics. There is no doubt that these observations have found their way
into my work over the years, but recently, I have become interested in trying to capture a specific
instance of this perceptual intensity within a single work, and have been using colours derived
from my own photographs to try to do this.

33

Fig. 12: School Wall in Barra de Navidad on February 25, 2015. Photograph.

I chose to photograph the scene above because I was fascinated by the odd combination of
turquoise and olive green on the outer wall of an elementary school in Barra de Navidad. As I
walked by this wall on a daily basis, I was repeatedly struck by the strange glow that this
juxtaposition of colours was producing against the concrete paving stones on the shady side of
the street. In keeping with these observations, for the work Untitled (Reclining Lozenge), I
focused on the hues that were most prominent in my memory of the scene, as I had experienced
the wall as the source of cooling emanation that bathed the entire area. The process of deriving
colours from this source helped me to recognize that I am not by temperament inclined to adhere
to a strict procedure of reproducing the palette of a photograph, but rather that I am interested in
deriving palettes from my subjective memories of everyday experiences, using photographs only
inasmuch as they are helpful in reinforcing those memories.
34

Fig. 13: Untitled (Reclining Lozenge), 2015. Oil paint on fibreboard, 10 x 24 x 40 inches.

In terms of form, I see an amusing connection between the vibrant cool of this palette and the
semi-figurative position that is suggested by the angle between the planes that make up Untitled
(Reclining Lozenge). Depending upon how one looks at it, the piece can resemble a streamlined
beach chair, or a bent surfboard, or more in keeping with my own idiosyncratic sense of humour,
an animated sausage-being who is either taking it easy or trying to get up off the floor. It is worth
noting that the stripes on this form reveal the same kind of handmade sensibility that we saw in
the earlier Stripe Set project, which may contribute a biomorphic undertone to the work,
although the figurative allusion may also be coming through in the way the pattern resembles the
stripes we might expect to find on fashionable t-shirts or socks. In any event, I see this piece as a
playful and lighthearted early experiment into the procedure of sourcing colours from a memory.
35

Fig. 14: Café Tablecloth in Barra de Navidad on February 25, 2015. Photograph.

As I was making a second work with colours derived from a photograph, entitled Stripey Loop, I
used a similar procedure as I had in the first instance, selecting the hues that I felt were most
important in my memory of the experience. In this case, I had been inspired by the radiance of a
striped tablecloth at an outdoor café. I was curious to discover whether I could capture the level
of visual intensity I had perceived in the tablecloth by applying its predominant colours to a form
that would amplify the sense of movement.

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Fig. 15: Stripey Loop, 2015. Oil paint on fibreboard, 38 x 24 x 38 inches.

As I consider the completed work, I would argue that the overall shape of Stripey Loop is making
a significant contribution to the optical action of its painted pattern, as the bands of colour
appear to stretch into triangular wedges as they make their way around the curves of each “U”
shape. In my view, the way the pattern changes as it circumnavigates this painting/sculpture
hybrid implies a clockwise motion that seems to have been temporarily suspended, as in the
children’s game where moving participants must freeze when they are being observed.

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Like the yellow Loop piece, this work also activates an important relationship between itself and
the wall, and by inference the history of wall-based abstraction. However, whereas the earlier
work gave the appearance of being caught in the act of slipping into the room, this more recent
piece has transitioned completely into actual space, although it still leans against the wall as if
reliant upon its two-dimensional antecedents for context or support. In my view, this work also
carries allusions to architecture and furniture, as the rounded “U” shape carries the echo of
arched passageways, while the form in its entirety can be read as the abstracted fusion of a table
and a folding chair. These associations make sense to me as markers of the everyday experience
that served as the initial inspiration for the work, for as I suggested much earlier in this paper, I
am very interested in the way ordinary things can appear quite strange when examined with
heightened attention or through the lens of an unusual state of consciousness.28
These musings align quite well with one of the central tenets of phenomenology, which holds that
perception is never a matter of passively receiving sensory information from a fixed world, but
rather that we are active participants in the shaping of our own perceptions, even in the simple
terms that we pay attention to some things while dismissing others. According to Maclagan,
“Our experience of the visible world is…not just a matter of registering impressions
or responding to external stimuli, it also involves the mobilization of a whole range
of psychological effects – feelings, memories, imaginative constructions of one kind or
another…These complexities of vision are both enhanced and transmuted when it
comes to our response to works of art” (35).
In the case of Stripey Loop, it has been my aspiration to externalize some of these imaginative
constructions and psychological effects, as I have tried to create a work that conveys the kind of
movement or energy that I perceived in that glowing tablecloth by the side of the road in Mexico.

28 See page 7 of this text.

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Tasty Colours
The final project of my MAA thesis artwork represents a departure from anything I have made
before, as it moves away from my customary procedure of placing contrasting colours next to
each other in order to generate perceptual intensities and optical effects. Instead, Tasty Colours
has taken shape as a collection of small fibreboard blocks that can, like the Stripe Set project, be
configured in any number of different ways. Unlike any of my previous works, however, this
piece also invites a tactile and participatory engagement from a viewer.
When I was cutting out the larger pieces of fibreboard material that would become the
Intermedial Experiments, I kept all of the scraps with the idea that I might be able to find a way to
use them. Eventually, I decided to shape them into a collection of small rounded blocks that
could later be glued together into some kind of painted sculptural relief. However, when I began
to sand the individual pieces, I recognized them as a source of considerable tactile pleasure, as
their softly rounded shapes fit very comfortably in the palm of a human hand. This prompted me
to complete the work as a set of individually coloured morsels that can be rearranged according
to the whim of a participant.
In keeping with my recent thinking about deriving palettes from specific colour sources, I began
to look for a way to amplify the connection I had intuited between these blocks and ideas about
pleasure and desire. Ultimately, my personal collection of commercial paint samples provided
the link I was looking for, and I began to sort through the swatches in my possession to find the
ones named after food items. I then proceeded to mix these colours in acrylic paint and apply
them to the handmade blocks.

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Fig. 16: Tasty Colours (peach sorbet, raspberry, new lime, crushed berries, rhubarb, fresh lime, grape
juice, chestnut, blueberry, chili pepper, pumpkin pie, lemon, mystic grape, sharp cheddar, orange
juice, cranberry, basil leaf, citron, hot spice, curry flurry, summer plum), 2015.
Acrylic on ¾ inch fibreboard, dimensions variable.

Fig. 17: Arrangement of Tasty Colours, 2015.

Fig. 18: Arrangement of Tasty Colours, 2015.

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Now that Tasty Colours is complete, I can see a resonance between this project and a work from
1989 by the Canadian artist Gary Neill Kennedy that I have seen exhibited at the National Gallery
in Ottawa. Kennedy’s piece, entitled An American History Painting (The Complete List of
Pittsburgh Paints Historic Colour Series), involves the vertical arrangement of a sequence of
commercial colour swatches with their corresponding names painted directly on the gallery
wall.29 Aside from the amusing word play of a title that conflates domestic décor with the History
Painting of the French academy, I think this piece carries more serious layers of social and
political commentary, as it invites us to think about connections between the history of the
United States and the culture of consumerism that has blossomed there. More significant to my
own investigations, however, is the way Kennedy’s project has fused a concern with colour with a
conceptual procedure.
I am very interested in continuing to explore the potential of conceptual systems to drive at least
some of the decisions in my work,30 although as I reflect upon the projects of my MAA thesis, I
suspect that I will never choose to adhere to a completely pre-determined set of rules. It feels
more compelling to me at the moment to look for ways to blend systems-based approaches to
artistic production with elements of arbitrary and subjective choice in order to assimilate an
asynchronous31 range of art historical cues into my own contemporary work.

29 For more about this work and others by Kennedy in the National Gallery permanent collection, see the website

page at http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artist.php?iartistid=2877
30 In 1966, the British-born art historian Lawrence Alloway published a catalogue essay to accompany the “Systemic
Painting” exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In this text, Alloway argues that a shift in painting
sensibility occurred in the early 1960s as many young artists had begun to work with rule-based rather than
spontaneous or expressive procedures to make their paintings (15). Although this essay has only recently come to
my attention, I look forward to following several of its threads in my future art historical research, as well as in my
practice-based investigations of systemic procedure. See Works Consulted.
31 In his essay “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” the American art critic and historian Hal Foster has suggested
that some contemporary artists have taken up the strategy of blending asynchronous art references in order to
grapple with the condition of “coming after” the innovations of the 20th century. See Works Consulted.

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Conclusions and Reflections
As I look back upon the works that have been described and analyzed in this paper, I see a
sequence of studio-based experiments and critical reflections that have enabled me to gain clarity
about the most important impulses behind my work. Moreover, I see that these projects have
stimulated artistic growth by opening up new avenues for theoretical investigation and material
production. As I have outlined, the Stripe Set project began as an extended colour experiment;
however, it evolved into an exploration of the perceptual implications of seriality and modular
form. Similarly, the Polychrome Lozenges, which began as an investigation of repetitive process,
matured as a playful critique of the serious attitudes traditionally associated with geometric
abstraction. The third body of work that I have included in this paper also underwent a
transformation while it was being produced, for while I initiated the Intermedial Experiments to
reconsider the metaphysical aims of Modernist painting, I soon found myself investigating the
potential for conceptual procedures to inflect colour-based works with additional layers of
context.
As I come to the conclusion of the MAA program, I find myself identifying quite strongly with the
concept that a studio practice can be understood as a form of research in its own right, for as I
have moved through the material processes of making work, I have made discoveries about my
artistic impulses and the contexts that inform them that I could not have anticipated at the
beginning of this period of graduate study. As I currently understand it, I can now describe my
methodology as a tapestry of interwoven threads that include the reanimation of Modernist
tropes, the mobilization of colour and pattern to create instances of perceptual surprise, the
development of strategies to link the everyday perceptual event with the staged situation of a
gallery work, and the employment of material techniques to craft events that carry coded signals
about the touch, time and attention that have gone into their production. Furthermore, it has
also emerged that I am involved in a process of blending rules-based procedures with elements
of arbitrary or spontaneous choice, as my program of artistic research has progressed through a
sequence of closed experimental procedures and open-ended discoveries

42

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