Final Review (Fall 2025 MassArt)

This semester, I treated my studio work as an extended study of surfaces as records of contact. I worked through the question of how an artwork might hold the physical evidence of its own making without defaulting to the hierarchy of front and back. Transfer drawing became the center of this inquiry. Repeated impressions of a self-portrait gradually displaced resemblance and allowed the surface to behave as a field of accumulated events. What remained on the paper was not an image in a traditional sense. It was the result of pressure, friction, and touch. At a certain stage, the work no longer announced a proper orientation.

My research helped clarify why this loss of orientation felt significant. In Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Jennifer L. Roberts articulates printmaking as a form of knowledge generated through touch and pressure. The print is not a reproduction of an image. It is evidence of an encounter between two surfaces. This understanding shaped how I approached the transfer. The backs of my drawings often held the most direct evidence of that encounter, even though they were never intended to be seen. Their value emerged not from resemblance but from the honesty of the contact that produced them.

Around the same time, I was reading Rosalind Krauss on indexicality in 1970s art. Krauss describes traces, rubbings, and imprints as signs that communicate through physical causation rather than symbolic meaning. They function as what she calls “messages without a code,” events registered directly on a surface when the symbolic system no longer frames the act. This idea helped me understand why I was drawn to surfaces that had been touched to the point of becoming unreadable. Instead of presenting an image, the transfer becomes an index that points to the conditions of its making rather than to a representational subject. Krauss writes that such marks emerge at the moment when the conventional sign collapses into trace. That collapse became visible in my own work as resemblance gave way to the record of repeated contact.

Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin also became important in understanding the slight differences that develop across the two sides of a transfer. Erin Manning writes about the infrathin as the smallest perceptible interval, a difference so slight that it resists classification. This idea allowed me to approach the distinction between front and back as a minimal shift rather than as a hierarchy. When two sides of a transfer become nearly identical, their relationship aligns with the infrathin. They differ, but not in a way that stabilizes one as primary. The interval between them remains open, contingent, and without preference.

Jane Bennett’s writing on material vitality added another dimension to this thinking. Bennett’s account of matter as active and responsive offered a framework for understanding the transfer as something shaped not only by my decisions but also by the tendencies of graphite, paper, and pressure. The final surface records the behavior of the materials themselves. The work becomes less a product of intention and more a site where bodies, materials, and forces interact.

Taken together, these ideas allowed me to articulate a position that had been forming in the studio. I am not interested in the front of the artwork or in the face that a viewer expects to meet. I am interested in the contact that produced the object. I am interested in the traces that accumulate when image is no longer the goal. I am interested in the moments when orientation breaks down and when surfaces register events without asking to be read.

The paintings I produced this semester extend this logic. By placing time limits on myself, increasing the distance between my body and the surface, and blocking my direct line of sight, I created conditions where control gave way to the record. These methods produced divergences between intention and outcome, and these divergences mirrored the indexical shifts I pursued in the transfers.

What I am working toward is a practice where the significance of the work is not located in a privileged side but in the accumulation of its making. The surface matters because it holds the history of contact. The distinction between front and back becomes a minor interval rather than an organizing principle. The work becomes a site of recording, and the record itself becomes the argument.

This is the direction my practice is taking. It is rooted in contact, in material force, and in a belief that the event of making does not occur on one side alone.