artist's statement

The focus of my work is construction- the physical act of positioning materials together. How the image is built up within painting, drawing, and printmaking becomes paramount to the subject matter. I work to set up a vocabulary of record keeping and mark-making. Through counterpoised actions of creation and destruction: cyclical sequences are referenced within the image. As Picasso stated, “Any painting is a summation of its destructions”. This alludes to a beginning and an end—a life cycle.

Blurring the line between representation and abstraction, my work focuses on the emotive rather than the derived. It is a history of merging forms invented, natural, and organic with the found, mechanical, and solid. To achieve a statement on development and destruction, I work and rework areas in paintings and prints by scratching, covering, and obscuring. I start with a surface to react to (oftentimes found surfaces) and build up and then work down and recover to consider the spatial and compositional effect of layering. By painting or layering in printed form the subject matter into existence it creates a mythology of reclamation.

I mostly work within series and suites to explore a cumulative theme—within a series there is a flow also representative of a cycle. The form and content of resulting artworks are observational but not representational, leaving in traces of the natural and industrial worlds enough to derive form from detritus and to reference the idea of reclamation as a comment on societal issues of disposability.

The pursuit of cycles began with the use of the cell as a metaphor, which was a way to cope with disease and loss. Visual influences still center on the cell, but have expanded to include visual debris such as acidic colors, pattern, repetition, and entropic forms to represent growth and decay. There is a connection visually incorporating the industrial forms to contrast the soft natural feel of the cell and conceptually between both subjects to document a larger cultural development and decay.

-Dustyn Bork, 2007