I’m interested in how history presses against the present and complicates how we understand both the present and the past. Abstraction provides both sensory pleasure and a language of metaphor for me to respond to living on the surface of these continually accumulating pasts.

Stripes are timelines. They build patterns and suggest cycles. They alert and caution. They create order and elegance through simplicity. They also signify, in traditions of Western image-making, outcasts and marginalized people

On my canvases, geometry behaves—until it doesn’t. Stripes are flat and regular yet sometimes mutate into dimensional, embodied forms. I disrupt the rhythm and repetition of stripes, making their fluctuations as constant as their regularity.

As I work, I animate relationships with fictional gravity, invented light, and trompe l’oeil passages like strings, shadows, air holes, and fleshy parts. Drips and smears express wear, a record of being in the world over time. Shifts in clarity and blurriness refer to an oscillation of attention between focus and drift— the difference mirrors a glitch between the precise present and memory.

Part of learning about history is recognizing its difficulties, its immensity, one’s unavoidable inheritances, and the grief of lapses in awareness and understanding. Painting allows me to make spaces that are both visual and psychological. Bringing together hard edges and softness, flatness and illusion, and repetitions and incongruities open up ways to also make space for beauty and humor.

DEBORAH ZLOTSKY

DEBORAH ZLOTSKY