Painted over/under: Painted Over/Under Parts 1-4 is a year-long project based on the mismatched color patterning created by “graffiti maintenance” on freeway retaining walls and other open walls in the city. Parts 1-3 have incorporated guest curators Les Figues Press, Jens Hoffman and Erin Cullerton, who invited writers, artists and architects to create drawings in shifts on the walls in LACE’s rear gallery. With each part of the project, works have been written and/or drawn onto the walls, then painted over with my color palette, creating a layered, abstracted painting defined by the shapes of past projects, offering a new starting point for the next group, and so on. Prior to each "painting out," we applied tape on the large wall-works to preserve portions of the work below. The final culmination of the project removed the buried tape line exposing the previous projects. Similar to a palimpsest, the history of the previous projects was revealed by the tape line drawing which wrapped the entire space. The inspiration for Painted Over/Under stems from the unlikely combination of Rauschenberg’s drawing “Erased DeKooning,” and a frequently graffiti-ed and re-painted truck which regularly parked in the artist’s neighborhood. Somehow these two concepts came together, these two moments of erasure - both creating something new by what is left behind but in utterly different contexts. I was thinking about how easily street art is painted out and how for his erasure drawing Rauschenberg had to find a well known artists work that would be ‘indisputably considered art.’ I'm not sure where the ‘indisputably art’ line is anymore.

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