Erin Washington
I remember learning about the ability to X-ray a painting, to
examine the previous layers of paint and their application.
Learning that you could see naked underpaintings, even mistakes
and corrections. Could painters, with only one canvas for their
entire life, make hundreds of paintings on that one surface? Can
we think about flat, two-dimensional space in a four-dimensional,
time-based way? A seed of that question germinates in my
current palimpsestic method: the history of processed accretion
is a present and available ghost. In my paintings, I reference
symbols and imagery from the sciences, mythology, and art
history that represent ruptures and schisms in the search for
meaning and truth. Colors fade, pigments are burned, chalk
erased: the physical objects emulate the metaphorical cycles
they describe. My actions and products are in a constant state of
flux, highlighting the disharmony between meaning, beauty, and a
fundamentally messy universe. However, the relative temporality
of the work’s making counters ambivalence; the immediate
process and present-ness of the work eclipses uncertainty . . . for
the moment.