Artist Statement:
Sitting on a subway train while traversing the Manhattan bridge you see a multitude of flashing imagery, girders, graffiti, and skylines. You process so much visual stimuli that even static objects seem to be in motion as they intersect and overlap with other objects and light.
My work for years has focused on addition, combining and overlapping elements to create a new dialogue through this layering. By grafting my photographs of graffiti, lights, garbage and flowers into a completely new environment, it becomes reanimated and creates the same visual experience as a landscape in motion.My work continued to evolve with a focus on this layering, intersections of color, and gesture until I was compelled to move in the opposite direction.
Perforation.
The reductive processing of punching holes in a whole host of layered images I had made through years of my practice created a new tension between their component parts. The shards of the original image, depending on their alignment with one another, allow for all kinds of new associative interplay.
My landscape, in this case, becomes the field of color that sits atop the image with the perforations peering through. The interplay between color and gesture as a result of my synthetic reductivism. New intersections. Landscapes perpetually in flux.
BIO
Starbuck was born in Rome, Italy on February 12th to an artist mom and poet dad. He lived there until he was 6 months old and regrets that he never learned Italian. But, then again, neither did Abraham Lincoln. He grew up in San Francisco with two brothers and it was a great place to be a kid when no one had coders for parents. He spent an odd year at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1982 making experimental films and seeing every sunrise while delivering produce in a box truck. Since then, he has recorded a lot of sound while making furniture, lights, paintings, drawings, and photographs. He has lived in Brooklyn, New York for decades while raising two daughters and continuing to record sound, dress sets, and make his artwork.