Gabriel Phipps

Region: Northeast

Website: http://gabrielphipps.com

City / State: Northampton, MA

The process of painting activates seeing. And it is the need to see that drives me to paint; a compulsion to slow down, to observe the world around me, the interior worlds of imagination and memory, as well as whatever paintings I have on hand. If one takes a protracted look at an everyday static object, a piece of masonry or metal, often that object will appear to shift under one’s gaze. The appearance of movement is evocative of an inner life, a subatomic dance or micro-cosmos. Though the pacing is distinctly different, daylight dappled across a brick wall displays a kind of visual activity analogous to that exhibited by a television screen or video game. Unexpected equivalences of this sort are manifest in my paintings. The geometric units that reverberate throughout the work are at once lighthearted and serious, flat and volumetric, solid and ephemeral, synthetic and organic, static and kinetic, fictitious and real; they are free-standing and verge on collapse; they embody someone who is no one, some place that is no place.