KEVIN TOWNSEND

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Time, mark, obsession—these concepts animate my practice and are the threads that run through all facets of my work. I am obsessed with time, fascinated by its accretion in the form of memory within us, and our unequal, subjective yet simultaneous experience of its passing. Time has depth, breadth, currents and flows— it exists simultaneously as individual moments and as a large sprawling body. Time is a sea. Time surrounds us; we can find ourselves immersed within it or skimming across its unpredictable and turbulent surface. Time heals, corrodes, swells, preserves, shimmers, torments, destroys, and is always in transition— never still. Within this fluid, phenomenological model for time, obsession emerges as a tidal force, a storm of attention.

These drawings extend my ongoing research and efforts to articulate the phenomenology of obsession as a time-space born of dissonant energies— inside of which there exists an intense, palpable self-awareness, a thinning, an ulceration of the barrier between instinct and dream, sensation and cognition. I am intrigued by the ways in which the tidal gravity of a given moment can warp and distort our experience of time and the ways in which moments accumulate in us, forming the architecture of our identity.

As the duration of these works has grown the experience of making them approaches a feeling of timelessness, a feeling of occupying an opening in the present. By eliminating any intentional image making at the outset, each mark only embodies the moment of its making and exists as a record of intention and attention in time— the drawings breathe into their surroundings and the collective present, allowing time to function as the true site for the work.