Covering

After returning from a journey through Hokkaido, I lost the photographs I had taken during my stay. Because I had experienced the landscape through a camera, losing the photographs seemed to erase even the sense that I had experienced it. I felt suddenly far removed from a landscape that had once been directly before me.

To gauge that distance, I first covered a carved wooden bear, an emblem of Hokkaido, with thick paint. I later shifted the subject to dinosaur figures in order to address the question more directly. No one has seen a living dinosaur; it exists through an imagined image that we collectively share.

By repeatedly covering ready-made images with paint, I trace the distance between an experience and the image that remains within me. Although these works take sculptural form, I understand them as paintings produced through the act of applying paint.