2023 NAXSMASH PAINTINGS

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Moving to California in 2000. My first work was a performance at Lake Nacimiento. At the site of a fight I had witnessed between my parents, on a road trip. As the eldest I wanted to make them stop and could not. Encountering this place again, I wanted to make a performance of breathing at the lake. It became the source of my first video work.  In digital editing my partner called the files a shorthand 'NAX." Afterwards I was moved to face how traumatic events disperse, are smashed. First, something is born into the world. Then, it's smashed. You look around. On the ground are the fragments. You pick up the pieces. You turn them around like little rocks or shards. The made-up word 'naxsmash' became an online project. I lost control of the site after a decade of work, when the domain was taken over by online drug sales. The 'naxsmash' trope I kept alive as my gmail.  The paintings in this set have not yet been public. They relate to tough situations. Several are integrating digital prints I made from photographs my grandfather shot, about twelve decades ago. They are from one of the notorious residential schools for native Americans. He and his father in law, my great- grandfather, ran one of those schools. Naxsmash is some kind of process of binding. The connective tissue is random and often fails. The smashing is violent in terms of grief and realization. The bits from the smashing travel. Like geologic p waves in the aftershocks of a quake. 
 

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