Mindless Pleasures (Volume 1)
The drawings in this series were initially inspired by the mechanics and measures of projection film stock and later expanded to an abstract exploration of the intersection of Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Plainsman and Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The repetition that creates a moving image is analogous to my drawing process; each drawing is made from reworking an image in many layers, repeating and erasing it again and again, just as the frames of a film move through a projector. The images I initially worked with were of celluloid and sprocket holes, but now also comprise text, including names, measures, and (most importantly) numbers that together map the narrative connections of character, conspiracy, paranoia, and corporate and governmental action. The layering of these images is not meditative; instead, these abstractions express the anxiety of existing within these ongoing systems of control.