Get In the Pit, focuses on remixing and editing as a tools to engage with sourced material from my childhood home. I unearth and/or insert subversive messages within the original. The wall installation consists of segments of paintings from my previous work. The paintings were run through a table saw to create 4 inch” strips that are then reconfigured, as if slipping down the wall, and onto the floor. 

Also present are record players on hifi stands. These records are made from latex paint which play only fragments from the originals as the players needle scutters across the surface of the record, only picking up small moments of recognizable music. Pink Floyds, The Wall is used both for its name, the content of lyrics, and my personal relationship to the album. “The Wall” in this show, is a place that paintings are slipping from and becoming more sculptural or undefined. Here, ‘the wall’ is cast as an impediment that is serving up modernist rules and seeks to confine. In Pink Floyds album, the lyrics written by Bob Geldof, are defiant toward failing institutions of education while expressing struggles of an isolated childhood. This is also my fathers favorite album. 

The three portraits on the wall were painted based on my mothers high school senior portrait. That photograph was taken to Korea by my uncle when he was in the military. There, he paid an artist to create an airbrush painting on silk based on the original photo. That painting, ended up in the basement of my childhood home. I found it as a child and the image become an idealized memory of my mother. I’ve observed that when I think of my mother, I often think of this painting by an unknown artist from Korea, instead of the person I actually know. In this way, the image seems to keep me from her. This image is what I used to create a series of paintings of my mom as a ghost and a zombie. Perhaps an absurd way to kill an image in an attempt to get closer to who this person is.

The shoes on the ground in front of the three portraits are sneakers from 1987. They are shoes I would have worn as a seven year old living in my parents home.