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Swainston, Rob
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Spring 2024
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2024
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8123_Justin_Pruitt.pdf
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I've been at war my whole life. Not the kind of war where bullets fly or lives are uprooted. The battlefront is my studio, my weapon is my paintbrush, and what's at stake is a state of imprisonment. My work is a strategic destruction of the boundaries of my mind that separate who I think I should be from who I am. It's an attack on the walls separating myself from others, an attack on the life planned out for me by oppressive systems, and an attack on perceptions of the impossible. My paintings free themselves from the traditions of their media by combining unconventional materials and techniques to bring together aspects of naturalistic figuration with experimental processes of abstraction.
Every piece is a push and pull. I delicately lay down oil paint with a brush to then tear open the canvas at its seams; I apply ink to plexiglass to then remove it and repeat again; I'll frantically lay paint on a surface using the energy of my whole body to then dial it back to a more careful consideration of where paint is placed and how. My process is a wonderfully violent dance of destroying what I've created to build something new with the ruins. My process walks the tightrope between conscious and unconscious and channels the energy of my family both chosen and blood, living and dead. In essence, my work seeks to extend my soul beyond the confines of my flesh so every experience bleeds into my mark making and into the hearts of my viewers.
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