Reckoning Table, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Project/project, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches
Forty-Seven Flags for Cease Fire, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Sun Light, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 35 x 35 inches
Umbra, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
First Light, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Holy Mountain, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 46 inches
Land_Scape, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches
Ampersand, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
Chimera, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Mandala (Expansion Device), 2022, acrylic on drop cloth, 2021, 48 x 48 inches
Tantra Diptych, 2022, acrylic, 76x 48 inches
Absolute Point, 2022, acrylic on drop cloth, 2021, 48 x 48 inches
Switchback, 2022, acrylic on drop cloth, 42 x 36 inches
The Past Isn't Even the Past, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Randomized Geolocator with Marshallese Navigational Chart, 2021, acrylic on drop cloth, 36 x 36 inches
Randomized Geolocator with Linear Geometric Intrusion, 2021, acrylic on drop cloth, 36 x 36 inches
Despite being born in Bozeman, I’m a Midwesterner who grew up in the Northwoods. My family’s enthusiasms for backpacking, hiking, and orienteering (a Scandinavian national pastime), and my own for hunting and fishing, provide insight into my studio practice. This group of abstractions is based on the act of navigating through nature, the basis for all of my artmaking. I try to incorporate my culturally specific lens of being of Dutch/Germanic and Finnish/Swedish descent, as well as identifying as a Bahá’í. The abstract paintings conflate cartographic components with sacred geometries. Abstract mark making is about spatial location, and sacred geometry makes the leap from location of the self to self-realization. I come from a long line of conquest, imperialism, and colonization—Vikings, European emigrants, and Mormon settlers—and I try to engage and disrupt this weighty inheritance and reimagine a different relationship to the natural world and the people who inhabit it.
There is also a temporal aspect to maps and geolocation related to moving across terrain, covering distance, and finding a way/wayfinding. Maps, as a tool, chart inner dimensions just as they do external features. Travel, navigation, and route finding are pursuits with a spiritual component, represented by the path of the seeker. Hindi, Jain, and Tantric visual traditions ground the cosmological to the physical. Bindu, a point or drop representing the undifferentiated absolute, have a long tradition in spiritual abstraction. At heart, it is similar to the Google pin, or even a compass rose—a sort of axis mundi which declares the present.
However, they also encourage distortion, which is also a form of abstraction. Distortion also furthers the agendas of one group over another. Spatial stretching and flattening, and representation of social and political divisions, requires a degree of imagination and creativity, if not suspension of belief while ironically still requiring belief. Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), in "Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations" asks, "How are we caring for land and each other? What are the moral geographies we have come to in the 21st century? How do the stories that bear witness in many forms and map our intimate and social geographies guide us in the past, present, and toward a healthier future?"
These paintings are a sort of abstract cartography, reimagining the spatial relationships as something other than tools of empire building and conquest, essential to colonial and imperial projects. Maps and mapping help us to understanding the world around us and our place in it. These paintings incorporate pole stars, way points, directional charts, even a graphic 3D rendering of a Viking calcite sunstone (a navigational tool preceding the compass), Marshallese navigational stick charts, early manuscripts and grimoires such as the 15th century Danish/ Icelandic Galdrabók and 19th century Huld, as well as Fraktur designs (glyphs, wards, rosettes, and hexafoos), which are a form of guiding and guidance too.
There is also a temporal aspect to maps and geolocation related to moving across terrain, covering distance, and finding a way/wayfinding. Maps, as a tool, chart inner dimensions just as they do external features. Travel, navigation, and route finding are pursuits with a spiritual component, represented by the path of the seeker. Hindi, Jain, and Tantric visual traditions ground the cosmological to the physical. Bindu, a point or drop representing the undifferentiated absolute, have a long tradition in spiritual abstraction. At heart, it is similar to the Google pin, or even a compass rose—a sort of axis mundi which declares the present.
However, they also encourage distortion, which is also a form of abstraction. Distortion also furthers the agendas of one group over another. Spatial stretching and flattening, and representation of social and political divisions, requires a degree of imagination and creativity, if not suspension of belief while ironically still requiring belief. Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), in "Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations" asks, "How are we caring for land and each other? What are the moral geographies we have come to in the 21st century? How do the stories that bear witness in many forms and map our intimate and social geographies guide us in the past, present, and toward a healthier future?"
These paintings are a sort of abstract cartography, reimagining the spatial relationships as something other than tools of empire building and conquest, essential to colonial and imperial projects. Maps and mapping help us to understanding the world around us and our place in it. These paintings incorporate pole stars, way points, directional charts, even a graphic 3D rendering of a Viking calcite sunstone (a navigational tool preceding the compass), Marshallese navigational stick charts, early manuscripts and grimoires such as the 15th century Danish/ Icelandic Galdrabók and 19th century Huld, as well as Fraktur designs (glyphs, wards, rosettes, and hexafoos), which are a form of guiding and guidance too.