Fabulous Teeth
Fabulous Teeth, 2025, 12 x 16 x 3/4 inches unframed, 13.25 x 17.25 x 2 inches framed,
acrylic, LDPE, oil stick on wooden panel
Fabulous Teeth comes framed in a natural wood colored frame and ready to hang
The Story Behind the Work
The largest ice field outside the Arctic is the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. Through erosion, the glaciers that make up the ice field formed the iconic shape of the Torres del Paine mountains in Patagonia, Chile.
Fabulous Teeth, named after a Pablo Neruda poem, features textures built up from layers of monoprinting with plastic bags (LDPE), underneath a layer of tinted Burnt Sienna and ultimately topped with markings from an oil stick. Rather than painting with my hand moving over a stationery surface, I used my feet to keep the oil stick stationery while the painting acted as a glacier moving over the painting, eroding the oil stick onto its surface.
"Every print is a result of contact and release, which links it immediately to themes of touch, presence, and intimacy but also loss, separation, and memory."
– Jennifer L. Roberts, art historian, Harvard
We live in a time of overwhelming speed — digital immediacy, rapid production, and a barrage of news updates. Nature, in contrast, moves at its own pace. Glaciers form over centuries, forests regenerate over decades, and landscapes shift in ways that are imperceptible to us yet are made apparent over time. I feel the contrast in timescales between people and nature as I worked on this series in New York surrounded by skyscrapers, new shops popping up on my street, and social media updates while thinking about the inspiration for this series, the slow descent to the Torres del Paine granite peaks of Patagonia and the glaciers that formed them over millennia.
As Jennifer L. Roberts says in her six-part National Gallery of Art lecture series, printmaking is an intimate act of creation in which two foreign bodies rub up against each other with part of one of those bodies physically rubbing off onto the other.
I see this, the contact and release, the rubbing up and rubbing off, as a beautiful metaphor for our relationships, including our relationship with the natural environment. This is why I encorporate monoprinting in my paintings. We shape the environment through our fear and an urge to contain, control, ignore, damage, admire, revere, abuse, and preserve it, and it shapes us via the fragments of it we take with us in the forms of materials, photographs, sustenance, memories, ideologies, and beliefs.
This piece will ship from New York within 10 days of order. Please allow an additional 1 - 2 weeks for domestic shipping.
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