George Pfau

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.georgepfau.com

City / State: San Francisco, CA

My work incorporates elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture, collapsing two and three dimensions to create renderings of the human figure. I use the space of painting as a site of mirroring, allowing us to reflect upon how we compartmentalize and classify ourselves. The wooden stretcher bars act as a skeletal structure, the stretched fabric and dense layers of paint as skin-line membranes. I work as an image surgeon, as if Dr. Frankenstein, both building and depicting a human-monster. I take dead materials and imbue them with time, care, and energy, bringing them to a state of “life” akin to that of a zombie.

I explore how one might recognize an image of a human body in an in-between state, or a state of becoming. I situate this state in the gray area between an illegible configuration of lines and an identifiable human form. When is the body in a state between human and thing, between “he/she/they” and “it”? What visual or iconographic components are necessary for a body to be considered human?