This project began while watching, from the screen of my laptop, a scene of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. In a closeup frame of Halle Berry as a crackhead flashed the memory of Theodore Gericault's Portrait of an Insane Woman (1822): the arrangement of the head, the slight divergence of the pupils, the overall stunned looseness of the face. The 1820s painting uncannily surfaces here in this late twentieth century image. I fumbled for my digital camera and began shooting the screen with the intent to make a painting.
I soon found myself looking frame by frame through my short stack of DVDs, comprising mainly 70s television shows made intimate through my childhood in the 80s. More correspondences emerged: a moment from The Cosby Show recalled Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, the jester “Rerun” from What’s Happening flipped from the streets of Watts onto the barricade of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and more.
I have become fixated with this visual unconscious: the strange, untimely lives of images, the back and forth parallactic shifts between distinct historical moments and specific media, and the way another medium may be wrought from the imbrication of painting and television. This effort demands a critical recasting of the established measures of painting—the procedures of facture and forms of address, structures of rendering and constructions of audience. The memory of painting and the memory of television may materially collude in their respective fabrics—the warp and woof of canvas and the luminous tissue of the screen—to tap the political valence secreted in this field of popular imagery, staged through a recall of painting of a lost historical past. Perhaps in this way the traps of history as pastiche may be sidestepped, and the deeper convergences of these relations and modes of symbolic production—the worlds which made them and those that they make—may be tested and disclosed.