The Weeklies 1995-?
For the Weekly Series I complete one 12” x 9” painting a week. Begun in 1995, I intend to continue it for my entire life.
The Weekly Series is an extension of my larger interests in encyclopedism and the history of natural history. While my other work has been concerned with scientific investigations that involve imaginary correspondences (Letters to Mary Ward and Home Studies in Nature) and a set of procedures to engage texts through drawing and painting, I consider the Weeklies as a kind of specimen collection that can exceed the more narrow scope of the individual projects. So while the projects are intensive and organized around a specific set of variables, the Weeklies might come from reading, from specimens, from an attempt to document an experience or event. This very distinction between the projects and the Weeklies I tend to think about in terms of the way natural historians might conduct very controlled experiments and at the same time collect specimens and engage in speculations that have not yet been reduced to a more specific project. I think of the Weeklies then, as a paradoxically non-systematic way to investigate all of my concerns that have not yet become systematic-- this being its encyclopedism. As the project continues, I am interested in how its increasing mass provides a common context for otherwise disparate working modes—be they based on a visual form of the journal, studies and explorations for my other work, and/or an immediate form of documentation. Whether each individual panel is intentionally journalistic or biographical or not, it ends up serving that function because of its literal relationship to time.
The Weekly Series is an extension of my larger interests in encyclopedism and the history of natural history. While my other work has been concerned with scientific investigations that involve imaginary correspondences (Letters to Mary Ward and Home Studies in Nature) and a set of procedures to engage texts through drawing and painting, I consider the Weeklies as a kind of specimen collection that can exceed the more narrow scope of the individual projects. So while the projects are intensive and organized around a specific set of variables, the Weeklies might come from reading, from specimens, from an attempt to document an experience or event. This very distinction between the projects and the Weeklies I tend to think about in terms of the way natural historians might conduct very controlled experiments and at the same time collect specimens and engage in speculations that have not yet been reduced to a more specific project. I think of the Weeklies then, as a paradoxically non-systematic way to investigate all of my concerns that have not yet become systematic-- this being its encyclopedism. As the project continues, I am interested in how its increasing mass provides a common context for otherwise disparate working modes—be they based on a visual form of the journal, studies and explorations for my other work, and/or an immediate form of documentation. Whether each individual panel is intentionally journalistic or biographical or not, it ends up serving that function because of its literal relationship to time.