There are 32 artists in this exhibition
making painting, sculpture, installation,
and I think it's really come together to
sort of show in a fairly substantial way,
a new generation of artists coming out
of America, and how vibrant and exciting
their work is. It has, hopefully, a
physical realness that I feel when I'm
in New York City. There's an urgency and
a physical reality of making it big and
making it strong. It's like turning up
the volume so the paintings are really
big, which gets me excited.
The use of the paint is very... I love paint
and I wanted it to look like a street in
New York. I worked on the painting for
three years, and in 2006 he died while i
was working on the painting, and it
turned into an homage to James Brown, and
he was a great inspiration to me. I
listened to his music on the radio when
I was a kid. I think he was just a great,
great American artist who is one of the
reasons I became a painter. America is
basically a global environment. You
have every culture there.
The piece deals with community and how
the patterning of the clothing kind of
represents the individuality of each and
everybody who makes a community, and the
the nine figures that support are kind
of like the pillars of society. They
represent those who kind of hold
everything together within a community
per se, whether it be government or
religion or social aspects of what makes
up a community. There's a lot of American
history and stuff involved and in the
work I make. I don't know if I'm a
typical American artist but I'm
definitely working in a tradition, in a
certain tradition of American Art. This
piece is called "Ssppecific Object," with a
bunch of s's, that honestly alludes to the
Donald Judd essay on sculpture. He
created a lot of Gestalt sculptures
where you could see the piece and
understand its form and its construction.
You can see that they're expressing very,
very different versions of realities in
which people can exist now. It's not just
existing in the real world, that there
are worlds online, on the
internet. It is expressing something very
new and different about not just America,
but about what is available to artists
to work with now. For the last of five,
ten years there's been an assumption
that the sort of center of the art world
has been London, in a way, and I think
this actually shows that what's going on
in America is really giving British
artists a good run for their money
