My pieces in this show contain aspects of all of these definitions. Roland chose them from a body of work that numbers twenty. When I started making them in 1999, I had a vague plan, which was to cover the surface of each panel with collaged paper. The paper was a collection of "to do" notes, book pages, dictionary pages, old drawings and doodles, and old prints. Each collage was a formal composition, and as I chose paper from my collection, applied glue, and arranged it, a technical system fell into place.
In essence, the collage became a pattern or surface or ground for me to react to. My next goal was to cover it all up. Through a process of layering paint, I pared down the busy-ness and visual activity of the collage to its essentials. The collage ground creates a history that shows through the skin of paint over it. All of this activity was my way of imposing a plot or narrative on the work. The painting-over of so much information creates intrigue. I want the viewer to get hints about the painting's complexity and to investigate by looking closer.
Then, in most cases, I made a drawing on top of the layers. This drawing is usually a diagram of my own design that is an abstract variation of a made-up construction. The construction might be a stand-in for relationships, physical phenomena, or deconstructed structures based on real structures I've seen.