Warren Lloyd

Lives and works in Rochester, NY, USA

Artist statement

Sobjects My inquiry into painting, installation and object-making has been motivated by the challenge of how to make objects and experiences that are simultaneously historical and new; oscillating between critical engagement with their own mediation and the generative poetics that derive from cycles of building and removing, reconstructing and erasure. Developing from these tensions, my work grows from an engagement with surveillance culture, art history, the medico-institutional gaze, philosophies of embodiment and forms of mediation. However, at its most general level, the work interrogates the basic opposition between subject and object or subjectivity and objectivity. I think of these works as Sobjects; where subject and object are made ambiguous, inverted, reflective, or embedded into or through each other. The aim is to capture the energy between original impulses, the compulsory, first marks and the subjective force of innocence and play, on the one side, and history, canonized genre, language, autonomy, objectivity and semblance, on the other. My goal is to make work that opens up a cyclical poetics of collapse and return, built from the process of its own construction, removal and reconstruction. By interrogating historical or canonized genres and cultural forms using every-day materials commonly associated with craft, children’s art and domestic improvement, like crayons, colored pencils, drywall and joint compound, in confluence with found and historically...

Artwork