“The metaphoric crossing between perception and hallucination occurs by means of the paraphernalia of painting, which is also that of recollection and re-cognition, as the recovery, to the senses, of what seemed to be forever beyond experience.” Paul de Man
“Mise-en-abyme“, a term coined by Andre Gide, which refers to the artistic trope of limitless reflection is akin to the physical experience of the carnival’s Mirror Maze. In my current extended painting practice, which includes painting, sculpture, collage, video, performance, and site-specific installation, I wish the viewer to “enter into the work” and find themselves occupying a different parallel space, narrative, and time, where the viewer becomes both the interpreter and the subject within the image, creating an unfamiliar, uncanny sensation between experience and representation. The spatial/architectural constructions in three recent installation projects deconstruct the cinema house into 1) a panoramic painting rotunda, 2) a funhouse mirror maze, and 3) a miniature architectural model of an apartment building in Warsaw. In the broadest sense, the crisis of representation as seen in the history of painting provides me with a dynamic conceptual meeting point between material, process, and language. Representation in this sense is capable of capturing historic perceptual changes from the development of linear perspective to the birth of cubism and the modernist fragmentation of the real, and from the invention of photography and the mechanically produced copy, to the digital, virtual space of the post-cinematic (digital video & new media). My recent installation work reconstructs or invents visual narratives of distant geographic, and temporal moments in pictorial or tableau spaces, allowing a collision of virtual ‘present-moments’ in a space designed specifically to stage these orchestrated time-collisions. I am currently working on a series of paintings, collages, and architectural models, which explores an intersection of image, film, painting, and the history of theater design.