To the Flower, the Sun is More Amazing than God

48"X32"

Kozo paper, gold leaf, colored gesso,resin

2011

This new series is an examination of the artistic impulse. Its excitement is in the challenge of a tactile and visceral discovery of art making that is inspired by the quotidian. It is painting’s inherent detachment from the world to which photography is intrinsically bound that these works exist to relate only to themselves.

Counterfeit explores intersections between realism in photography with the expressionistic aspects of painting and the abstractionist possibilities inherent in both. We are inspired by Rauschenberg’s idea of  “working within the gap between life and art”. We explore the tension between photography and painting, realism and abstraction.

We are seeking the essence of multiple mediums. We use the mechanics of photography to record directly and the nature of the paint, gold and paper to express the hand of the artist. We draw from the methods of realism to scrutinize, expressionism to exaggerate and abstraction to formalize and create a fundamentally visual experience.

The content of Counterfeit is of particular interest to us. These images are exaggerated photographs of world currency that distill the value that countries place on their histories and culture. We find the secular canonization of politicians, a reverence of animals and the celebration of artists and poets. It fascinates us to see the similarities shared by countries that are culturally and politically polar when they choose to filter their histories onto a few square inches of paper.

Counterfeit maintains a parallel to our past work in dealing with concepts of integration through disintegration, while it departs from our traditional subject matter and adds the element of color. We see it as nostalgic absurdity—a pataphysical solution—two degrees separated from reality. Like the current evolution of money through the advent of technology we re-contextualize the (arguably) most ubiquitous form of art, pushing currency further into oblivion.