About My Skyscapes

I’m interested in dichotomies, the things that don’t seem to match up, the things we try so hard to reconcile. We desperately try to mash disparate things together, hoping to make sense of ourselves and our world. Sometimes, I just give up and tell myself “it’s ok, I can just hold those things in different hands”. Sometimes, I can’t do that. For me, these dichotomies are the remnants, the leavings, of having grown up in different cultures and places, of being trained as a scientist and an artist, of being a materialist and a daoist. How do I make sense of these things that pull me in so many directions?

My current body of work negotiates the question of what is nature and what is manufacture, or artifice if you want. My daily commute takes me through the canyons of office towers, sunrise reflected on the watery glass, red clouds broken by spidery power lines. I find myself wondering if this is my new Yosemite, the reflective glass and power lines replacing the snowy peaks and trees. In the late summer of 2019, I began exploring these thoughts with a photography project. My plan was to post a picture a day on Instagram for a year. I had rules for this game. Only take photos when I was stopped by traffic lights during my morning commute. Sometimes it took weeks to be stopped at just the right spot and I had to be patient. I learned that when you take the time to see, then everything, the light, the clouds, the way the buildings look, changes every moment of every day. It’s not simply a rhythm of red and green that most drivers experience. Then COVID came, and with it no more commute. So, I started painting these precise moments in time. 

I now have a series of paintings of these moments, things I have experienced rather than invented. This idea of capturing a “true” moment in time and space seems even more relevant in our contemporary AI informed world. Scenes of beauty and expansiveness exist in this messy city of ours, a city where skyscapes are cluttered by both buildings and the power grid rather than trees and canyon walls. Edward Hopper and Alex Katz are important touchstones for me in this work. 

Going forward, I want to continue exploring formal composition but also bringing in my personal experience growing up in different cultures and environments, i.e. Southeast Asia vs various US cities, megalopolises vs. wilderness. Am I a city girl or a nature girl, am I an average white American or part Asian in a weird unseen way, do I approach the world as a scientist as I was trained to do, or in light of my current Daoist practice. How do I make sense of these things?