We all have the same inner life, Agnes Martin once observed. The difference lies in the recognition.
These images begin with the biological truths to which we are, each of us, inevitably tethered. Each originates with a selected scientific image—a histology—which is to say, a biological sample of human tissue captured on a slide. These images are then projected or printed onto canvas and painted: protoplasms (an anatomical material) rendered through pigment (an aesthetic one).
While they formally present as abstract images, they are, in fact, precisely the opposite, reminding us that at a molecular level, we all look the same. Heart muscle is heart muscle—at turns porous and sinewy, slick and thick. Dendritic cells are slender lines, like tree branches, that process antigens in the immune system. These are visual metaphors, but they serve equally as compelling conceptual models.
The paintings in this series propose that at a certain fundamental level—somewhere between the reassurance of scientific certainty and the delight of formal abstraction—we are all united, and that it is within this stunning visual vocabulary of biological beauty that we present as a species. To participate in that understanding, and to observe the simultaneously specific and epic ramifications of what are, in the end, the microscopic cells that give us life, is a piercing reminder that we are all reducible to something extremely concrete, something deeply primal and inordinately gratifying in its sheer reductivism, its pure claim to form.
