Through internalizing the world around us I begin to investigate how my personal history can often mirror communal history. I truly believe that an honest account of ones own visual experiences can circumvent nostalgia and begin to address concerns of uncertainty, promise, and the ongoing need to question assumptions. Through thick layers of paint, I am expressing the complex nature of the everyday that is dense with information and not always easy to navigate. I am striving for an understood complexity.

After years of creating paintings that were inspired by place and memory, in recent months I have found that my creative process is less about the falsity and fantasy in memory and more about the act of collecting and reassembling visual successes from the everyday. Travel continues to be an integral part of my creative process, as I am drawn to variety, which is researched through multiple landscapes, climates, and cultures. I am continuously looking to expand, to gather, and some how organize these complex experiences. This tendency interjects in all aspects of my life, most notably in the piles of paper and stacks of notebooks that contain a plethora of lists. In my visual research I literally collect objects, patterns, textures, and color from multiple sources by gathering physical objects, making drawings, capturing memories, and taking lots of photographs. Later in the studio these puzzle pieces, these lists of things to remember, are brought together into new configurations that deny gravity, physics, and inactive space while embracing art history, geology, and uncertainty. 

Formally, the many layers of paint create a variety of textures and display multiple perspectives and dense compositions, for despite my urge to organize I cannot resist my natural impulse to add “everything but the kitchen sink”. The result is an undefined expansion where one can either retreat and feel the world collapsing in or emerge to navigate through the compact piles of stuff. The abstractions are referential yet unclear, much like my memories, collections, and lists. The paintings are reflections of my everyday, and thus by internalizing the world around me, manipulating images, and recreating environments I am looking for how the personal affects the communal and vise versa. 

Erin Treacy

January 2012