Todd Bourret

The relationships between site, history and aesthetics are primary concerns in my work. My paintings examine how certain abstract/formal devices originating in postwar American art – drips, pours, piles, stains, scatters, etc. are manifested socially, formalized and assimilated in various contemporary situations. Dialectically opposed ideas of formal/formless, abstraction/representation, less-is-more/more-is-more, etc. are fused and confused in my paintings. Lately, my work has made a slight, but significant shift away from mimetic (representational) painting and toward a body of work where process, labor, and the indexical function of painting is emphasized. I began to see the canvas as a kind of obtuse recording device, onto which the conditions, materials and actions of a working space are revealed. The paintings describe & document a real situation – what is around my studio at any given time. But they refer as well to that which is often overlooked or discarded in a landscape – scraps of trash, accumulated piles on the sides of roads, the messes we sweep aside or ignore. They also refer, through choice of materials and colors, to domestic and/or working spaces in various states of disrepair. For my Artocracy portfolio, I created a series of images by scanning the surplus of finished paintings: used tape, tape spools, and the plastic cups I use to mix paint.