The Image Between Us

When we began painting together, we worked on the same surface. The paintings often became too dense. We started making images on separate transparent sheets and bringing them together afterward.

One image could remain distinct while changing what happened behind it. Screenprinted layers and other techniques followed. In acrylic boxes, the sheets could be held at two or three depths. The distance between our contributions became something we could work with. Two decisions could remain visible inside the same construction.

One of us places something; the other responds. A fragment moves, a surface is added, a scale changes. Sometimes the response opens a direction neither of us had intended. We do not have to work at the same moment or in the same place for the exchange to continue.

In an installation, we may no longer be able to say who made each part. Years of making have given us different ways of building and handling materials. Paint, a photographic print and a found object offer different resistances. What we discover with one can become useful with another. An uneven object changes the projection that falls on it; folding gives a photograph a body.

A work can begin with something that has been waiting in the studio. We turn an old photograph upside down or bring a painted fragment beside an object made years later. The combination asks us to make another decision.

A grasshopper once entered our studio and stayed on a sheet of paper before leaping out again. It keeps returning through the work: a small printed mark, a constructed body, a public sculpture. The visitor left. We are still following what it set in motion.