My work has always been driven by a desire to embed concepts, interests, and critique into the material form of paintings.  My work comes out of an interest in painting as a language in which invention, analysis, and the stuff of paint can work in concert with each other. These paintings feed off of the history of abstraction, physics, traditional eastern imagery, Chinese and Tibetan landscape motifs, digital imaging, and other sources.  There is a constant flux between empty and full, atmospheric and graphic, abstract and figurative, quiet and psychedelic. 

The recent dialogue about beauty, a passion for color, and a belief in the relevance of tactility and transcendence also informs the work.  This medley of sources is orchestrated to create or reconstruct a world within the paintings in which a new kind of sense is made - one in which the beautiful and the absurd, the sacred and the mundane cooperate.  I want monks and magpies both to love the work.  I am interested in the challenges of trying to forge a pictorial landscape in which anything might possibly be included, but that seems to possess its own internal logic. "Accidental Ironies", for example, combines French "chinoiserie" wallpaper, psychedelic drips, Tibetan landscape motifs, puffs of pigment and cloud like areas painted with a nod to Turner, and a flocked silhouette of Indian deities.

 A recent rereading of Foucault's' 1967 "Of Other Spaces - Heterotopias" essay was an inspiration since it perfectly defined the intent of much of this work - to create paintings in which several different locations or spaces are made to coexist within one space.  In some ways, any of my paintings could be called heterotopic - "juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible."  Ideas of how we construct our realities and selves through language, social structure, geography, etc. offers a seemingly endless band of possibilities - my work as a painter is knitting the world together in a kind of visual globalism.

I anticipate that this process of gathering, processing, researching, synthesizing, and weaving together diverse imageries and ideas can continue indefinitely - I've never felt my work to be so full of potential or variety.  I think that painting as a whole right now is newly vital again as a result of its ability to absorb, ingest, and transform multiple sources, like a B movie monster devouring everything in its path and becoming weirder, stronger, and more complex. 

Jackie Tileston