Exhibition: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, April 18–May 30, 2008.
These recent gouache on paper studies developed in reference to the two staircases that occupy opposing corners of my home and studio / residence in Chicago. The images translate my experience of these transitional spaces in visual and conceptual terms that extend, yet are distinct from, the previous Living Rooms, drawings and paintings completed 2001- 2005.

Integral to my daily, lived experience, these stairs and landings lead me from, and return me to their respective destinations, east and west. Initially, the traced profiles and dimensions of the stairs and landings, as well as their given material or color, served to anchor their visual identities. As the drawings progressed, the two colorations of gouache (variants of brown and green-gray) became inseparable from each stair’s profile (read as elevation), as well as the different representations of the east and west landings (read as plan). The images began to re-inscribe themselves in the practical events of life and work: each climb or descent – east or west – offered an increasingly ‘visualized’ experience, and I began to understand these particular stairs and landings in more reflexive terms.

Importantly, the measure of the brush, and the material attributes of gouache – with its alternately pleasurable and distressing capacity for a fresh application of paint to re-dissolve and pool the previous layer(s) of pigment – served to reconstruct a step’s profile or establish weight within the perimeter of each landing. One by one, these works on paper provided an opportunity to recognize and examine certain visual and subjective meanings housed within the reversals, insertions, and transpositions of image, color and scale – between stairs and landings.