Wall Plates

Solo exhibition at Sala de Espera, Tijuana, MX

March - May 2024

One day in 2022, I found myself holding up a triple toggle light switch cover and looking through it. I held it vertically, rather than how it is typically affixed to the wall. Visible through the holes was sky, a roof, and trees. Suddenly, a new type of landscape emerged: mostly blocked out with smooth plastic white were three peep holes that showed various snippets of a vague place. Six more holes for screws were portals to additional vantage points.

The paintings in this show are based directly on wall plates I have collected over the past couple years. The dimensions of these canvases, 40 by 24 inches, are the same ratio as the real objects. My work plays with scale as a way to estrange a viewer from what is before them. I often use domestic elements that are both familiar and slightly bizarre, that we see and interact with every day, but may not easily recognize out of context.

Three years ago, I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, NM. I was drawn to her approach to zooming in and cropping to disguise familiar elements of the natural world. I learned about her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz and their mutual influence on one another’s practices. She became familiar with modern photography and the mechanisms that made this new art form possible. Her exposure to a camera’s viewfinder allowed her to see a delineated sliver of the world while blocking out the rest of the field of vision. Intrigued by this way of seeing, she utilized found animal pelvis bones and other ephemera as viewfinders. The museum displayed a photograph of O’Keeffe in the New Mexico desert holding up a piece of Swiss cheese to her left eye as an impromptu tool. This photograph continued to linger in my mind as a strategy to observe the world.

“Georgia O’Keeffe with the Cheese” echoed an image I had archived from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After years of trying, my Hungarian grandmother was only able to escape her native country in the weeks after the Revolution when border security was at its most lenient. Pre-Soviet invasion, Hungary used a flag with horizontal red, white, and green bands and a central coat of arms. With the onset of Soviet rule in 1949, the new coalition government changed the central emblem to a communist coat of arms, with a red star, hammer, and wheat sickle. As protests and fighting broke out, Hungarian revolutionaries cut out the newly imposed emblem as a symbol of resistance. With their similar dimensions to nation-state flags, these Wall Plates contemplate how we render multifaceted places into flattened representations. They conceal and reveal, leaving spots to peek through.