For some time, I’ve been obsessed with the recent translations of Walter Benjamin Arcades Project and his ideas concerning the ruination of modernism. My older works, use painting as the ideal place from which to imagine the living wreckage of modernity. In Benjamin’s writings, the Collector is a figure who attempts to derive specters from the remnants of history. The paradox of the collector is similar to that of the history painter, (s)he attempts to build up wreckage. As the (re)collector of ruined spaces, I want to attempt to inhabit the end of modernity in my painting. Painting itself is in ruins; as a dysfunctional medium whose end has been continually (re)performed for some time, it seems ideally located to serve as an allegorical environment to engage in these philosophical inquiries. As Benjamin announced, “Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.” The ruin is what we are left with when the life that the allegorical discourse of modernity temporarily breathed into a landscape has fled. In my History Paintings, images of the collapse of communism, and other moments that signify a wreckage of an unattainable future utopia accumulate and overlap to form a landscape of debris. As Brian Massumi eloquently commented in his text The Politics of Everyday Fear, “What society looks toward is no longer a return to the promised land but a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of day-to-day life.” By heaping fragments of modern architecture, visual culture and historical moments together in one painting, I hope to provide an explosive moment where past and future collide in one present instant; time stands still and we can imagine what was (is being) lost. Ultimately, I want to remember history not as it was, but as it could have been.


1) Lawson, Thomas. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York.: Godine, 1984.