I started the light switch paintings as a way of questioning my reality, while working as a housecleaner in San Francisco. Supporting myself here required an intensive work schedule, forming a rift between the necessity to work and my identity as an artist.
At my various work locations, I began fantasizing about escape routes as though flipping the right light switch would open a portal and deny this dimension’s laws of physics. The act of turning on a light switch serves as an indication to test conscious awareness in dreaming or waking reality; in time inducing lucid dreaming.
Perhaps indulging these lines of thought could affect my circumstances as a worker on the bottom rung of an accelerated Bay Area economic system. By influencing the dreamscape, shifts might occur in everyday reality, or vice versa, by regarding waking life as a lucid dream. Immersed in completing methodical, fatiguing cleaning tasks, the body is forgotten, giving way to withdrawal into mind and meditative focus.
I have recreated the light switches of my clients' dwellings as paintings. They evoke a quiet order and stillness that echoes the solitary and tedious nature of housecleaning. Altogether they document the sites inhabited and glow with the auras of strangers' residences.
In rendering the light switches as oil paintings, preternatural qualities are imbued into these mundane, utilitarian objects.
