The Attempt to Hold

The Attempt to Hold is a five-work series about depiction as an effort to give form and duration to what exceeds control. Beauty, another person, disturbance, absence and departure each provoke a different kind of holding.

Across the series, apparently sober painterly scenes become quietly unstable. A reflection returns a gaze the sitter withholds. An empty garment casts the shadow of a body. A departing figure leaves contact embedded in stone.

The works ask whether making an image possesses its subject, preserves it, submits to it — or simply records the point at which possession fails.

The picture is not the thing. Its failure to become the thing may be part of why it matters.