(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2001) Comnick, Julie
In my paintings I depict the 'weeded out.' The people in my images are socially commonplace, and the material objects are unsentimental, discards, or debris. They are persona and things that inhabit our everyday experience, but go overlooked within our urban landscape. In my continued tendency to portray the disregarded, or to look at the overlooked, I have become concerned with the act of making the unpictorial pictorial. When commonplace elements are extract from their ordinary environments and posited within the painting, they come subjects. Renewed within the painting, the subjects take on a primary role as allegorical signs and social indicators. I depict theses subjects on monochrome grounds, secluding them form their conventional settings. By isolations the subjects I have, in effect, pre-selected the focus of the paintings, disrupting consciousness' accustomed task. Without the need to distinguish or discriminate, the observer perceives the images form outside the periphery of consciousness. Consciousness predetermines what not to observe; my paintings ask the viewer to go back and see the things that went previously overlooked.
