Myriad

The Myriad paintings contemplate the idea that a person can be constituted through countless parts and relationships while experiencing themselves as a singular being. They extend my broader inquiry into the body as a place where biological, geological, and technological histories accumulate, and where the familiar presence of a person encounters forms and timescales that exceed an individual life.

Across this body of work, painted figures, cast elements, minerals, and mechanical forms give physical substance to questions of embodiment and selfhood. Their relationships emerge through successive acts of making and revision. The works carry the history of their own construction alongside my own accumulated experience with materials, techniques, and technologies through dozens of years of artmaking.

Within this inquiry, Myriad turns toward the intimate, elusive conviction of being “me.” How do matter, sensation, memory, and inherited experience become one particular presence? The figures retain their individuality even as the boundaries that organize their bodies become uncertain. Their coherence persists through relationships among disparate parts.

The title finds a resonance in William Faulkner’s “The Bear” from Go Down, Moses: “… not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part.” Faulkner provides some language to a tension that has existed in my work: belonging to the world while experiencing oneself as distinct within it. Myriad holds that tension, allowing unity and multiplicity to inhabit the same body.