Kyle J. Bowersock

I use lots of house paint and wood stain – typically on large canvas or paper. I enjoy big paintings, therefore, I make big paintings. Cause & effect. I suppose that's really the central theme around my work. Allow me to discourse for a moment, where I feel I should talk about call & response, perception and influence, and other historical ramblings.

Disease is something everyone is familiar with on some level. I've lost vision due to complications with diabetes – it is my own fault. I take better care of myself now, but the damage done creates my most personal experience with the many aspects of cause and effect. Grey spots exist in a space between my brain and the real world, sometimes integrating with whatever I'm looking at. In my work I let these damaged and muted interpretations of my environment find an association with the often extreme amounts of light, color, sound, and other information that contemporary visual culture likes to throw at us. 

Many contemporary artists practice in a way that relies on a call & response method – that is: they make a mark or series of marks, step back from the work, absorb it, and respond to that mark with another mark, all the while pulling the influences from the world around them. I am no exception to this. While I don't believe my work is particularly politically motivated, I would say that there are strong undertones of visual culture and the extension thereof. Streaks of paint made to look like blurs of motion, LED neon lights creating dialogue about the emergence of the loud, screaming advertisements of the late 90's and thereafter, and the evolution of this by using new technology, multiple layers of color, shape, and line are used to assign space and create a problematic viewing surface of each piece, where the illusion of space is either heightened or muted. I use house paint. It's not really archival or lightfast, so the color fades over time - suitable for showing the temporality of all that we know.