Val Nelson, Review

ARTIST STATEMENT
Since 2002, I have been making paintings of iconic travel destinations, through which I have explored my interest in the complexities of perception as filtered through desire, memory and loss. These themes, which appear in the novels of Virginia Woolf (such as To the Lighthouse), the philosophical writings of Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel) and theories of cognitive science, are manifested in my paintings through the use of negative space, blurs, and fragments. In my recent videos, “Loss” and “Pattern Recognition”, I fetishize memory of cultural pilgrimmages in Europe through truncated scenes, bitmappy imagery reminiscent of decayed VHS tapes, and minimalist soundtracks.

Drawing is very important to my practice, as it helps me get in touch with my marks; through exercising elements of control and chance on paper, I can re-connect with the energizing territory of “play”. Play is immersion in an activity as an end in itself, a freedom from any attachment to outcomes. It is this spirit I bring into the more demanding arena of painting.

To me the heightened awareness of the traveler parallels the mind-set of the painter — each mark on the canvas requires a complete immersion in that moment. A painting is an accumulation of moments.