The drive towards construction is an attempt to form a relationship with life through the chosen activity of painting. As the painter's mark territorializes the space of the canvas the mark signs itself as a body. The body of the painting is a dynamic organization of formal relationships, which represents the complexities of existence as experienced by the individual. In this case, the body has deformed into a mutant hybrid. The language of western abstraction is processed through an alien shifter (the brain of the Other), where the translation is corrupted and altered. Painting as language behaves as virus, and its offspring is a monster. Counter to the purge of modernism, this painting emerges as an accumulation and layering of multicultural realities and experiences. The loss of mind/body coherence becomes a debris field of the post-colonial subject, and is the form taken by a baroque consciousness where life is grotesque.

Bio
Arvin Flores is an M.F.A. graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York NY, and has his Bachelor of Arts at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Hampden Gallery MA, Columbia University's LeRoy Neiman and Wallach Art Galleries NY, Aljira Contemporary Art Center NJ, and at Southern Exposure Gallery SF. He has teaching experience at Columbia University NY, California College of the Arts SF, UC Berkeley Extension, and currently at Root Division.