In 2009, I accepted the challenge of creating new work in an unfamiliar medium. The venue was Expo, a show by the members of SOIL, Seattle’s artist-run gallery for developing, exhibiting, and advancing experimental and innovative art. The assignment I gave myself for Expo was to use paint as a sculptural medium.

It’s not that sculpture was completely new to me. It has been my practice for a long time to clarify my ideas about light, form, and space by building objects as models for my paintings. Although the paintings that emerge from this practice may look like abstractions, they are actually concerned with the same phenomena elucidated by the models. But, facing the Expo challenge, I found myself becoming curious about the influences that painting could have on the way I build things. And so, in a reversal of my usual process, I began using paint to construct objects.

The piece I made for Expo was called Room. It consisted of a single continuous row of paint drops lined up at eye level all the way around the gallery’s walls and front window. This two-dimensional painting had the effect of turning the gallery itself into a painting that the viewer could enter as a three-dimensional space. It became the first major piece in a new body of work that teases out and holds the tension between actual space and an illusion of space.