JM Howey

Toward the end of my years living in the city, most of the days I spent in the studio were dedicated to making mechanical pencil drawings on paper. In these works I pictured ways some of New York's recent and suddenly ubiquitous fixed-use leisure infrastructure might be mobilized toward more elaborate, convoluted ends.

Could a Citi Bike be used as a spontaneous blockade during rush hour, altering certain flows if only for a few minutes? Yes, if you had the right bike locks, but this might get complicated given that your personal information has already been noted by the bike you're reappropriating. I suppose if you've reached the point where this feels like a meaningful gesture, you may no longer care, but some people are just trying to get to work. Through a certain lens, would it be justified to covertly harvest a private community garden if it were in a really posh neighborhood? I certainly understand the sentiment, but this is ultimately questionable, given that we have no idea who these plots actually belong to. Still, the use of the word free on the little free library was a bit misleading. Now that all evidence of their existence has been erased, is there a secondary market for used Revel scooters? In their absence, have their components attained some sort of collector's item status?

After making quite a few drawings, some of which are in this show, my attention eventually turned back to painting. In doing so, I once more became interested in the indeterminacy of freehand, loose painting, and the odd subjectivity of making color decisions. The thin graphite line of the drawings, when applied to painting, could still carry the work's pictorial infrastructure while also serving as a formal restraint to bump up against, run parallel to, or complicate as I applied additional paint and experimented with the limits of my agency.

As an artist, I tend to gravitate toward procedural restrictions, suspecting that within them I'll find malleability. I've knowingly consented to expressive tools that openly assert their predetermined defaults. A little like some of the figures in these pictures, I'm experimenting with approaches for mitigating the integrity of otherwise rigid presets. In doing so, I inadvertently admit to a belief in the possibility of an utterance, an artwork, perhaps even an existence beyond a received inevitability.