Science Against Modern Crime
Charles Olson, credited as the first literary figure to use the term postmodern with pertinence to contemporary discourse, insisted that, “[art of value] does not seek to describe but to enact.”
This project became a way of investigating what it was, specifically, that painting meant to me. Why had I come to this point where painting was the most important thing that I had to do? And why was it important at all? In terms less specific to myself, what was it about the art of painting that gave it its vitality? The question “Is painting dead?” seems moot and that’s not really what I’m talking about. Painting, after all this time, while not lately occupying the coveted central role which it previously enjoyed, still seems to be popular. A more interesting question I think is, “What is it about postmodern painting that gives it its vitality and its relevance?”
This is the question that I was occupied with when I was developing this series.
-from the lecture Specificity
”Science Against Modern Crime is an ongoing series of encaustic-on-canvas paintings. The fingerprint imagery, drawn mostly from technical and procedural manuals (FBI, Scotland Yard, etc.), has to do with the systematic classification and categorization of information and identity. More importantly, in relation to painting, it’s about scrutinizing the actual physical residue that’s left behind when a person has been somewhere and done something. Painting can be thought of in similar terms; as the residue or marks left behind.
The project, consequently, engages fingerprint science as a metaphor, specifically the Henry system of classification which is based on four groups of ridge patterns – arches, loops, whorls and composites. This system is then expanded by assigning a primary colour to each of the three basic patterns – yellow for arches, blue for loops, and red for whorls with composites comprised of combinations and juxtapositions of the primaries. Variations on the basic patterns, such as tented arches or central pocket loops, involve variations of the basic colours.
The series is divided into two distinct parts. The first section’s focus is on the classification of ridge formations and their assigned colours. The second part is broken down into smaller sets of paintings concerning proper procedures, scars and deformities, problems in fingerprinting the dead, and latent print comparisons. Included in the first group is a sub-set of “Evidence” paintings based on “The Dance to the Music of Time” by Nicolas Poussin – an unremarkable allegorical picture in which, remarkably, the entire surface is embedded with fingerprints, all made by the same digit, presumably the artist’s own.
Hot wax, once applied, resists further manipulation, asserting a propensity to record gestures in sequence. As a project, Science against Modern Crime aims to exploit this and other characteristics of the medium. The intention is to explore and manifest such vital properties of postmodern painting as its physicality, its susceptibility to chance, its temporality, and the kinesthetic factors crucial to both its making and its reception.”
- Artist’s statement, 2003