COLORLESS GREEN
Colorless Green is an ongoing series of works on paper, based on aerial images of sports and games courts. Sourced from freely available satellite imagery, these pieces consider that these spaces designed for play, contain meanings beyond their intended function: courts as platforms for social discourse; courts as exclusive or exclusionary spaces; courts as compositions of line, form, and color when viewed from an aerial perspective; etc.
The real-world references for these compositions are sourced from across the world, without regard to international borders, local contexts, or the slippery boundary between what constitutes public and private. As paintings, these real spaces are presented free from their original contexts of backyards, public parks, country clubs, or prison yards; and become abstractions into which new meanings can be read.
The title of the project comes from Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, in which he uses the sentence, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” as a model of a sentence in english that is grammatically correct, but is semantically nonsense. Similar to Chomsky’s model sentence, these courts – which sometimes collapse the lines and markings of multiple games onto a single plane – can be "grammatically" deciphered, but become garbled when considered as a whole.