Random Walks in Endless Fields

Random Walk in Endless Fields, exhibited simultaneously at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York in 2010, represented a return to working with contingent compositional processes in conjunction with painting.  The painted mark became a continuous line—extended across the edges of the picture plane taken as a continuous field—whose changes in direction happened according to chance, by a stochastic random walk process.

By combining the chance process with an intuitive and gestural use of mark and color, the Random Walk works engaged questions of agency and intention in abstraction, that in turn put pressure on Modernist norms of hierarchical pictorial language and meaning structures. They also committed to a positive abstraction of invention and possibility, unbracketed by irony, cynicism, or a rehearsal of an end.