My most recent group of abstract paintings is called the “rendition” series. Like abstraction, the term rendition implies a subjective account of experience, a recollection, a translation or an interpretation. This particular series of works focuses on the fragment, the segment and the enlargement in order to imitate the chance effects associated with forensic evidence. The term rendition is also defined as “deportation for war crimes” and “torture by proxy”. Although Abstract expressionism was often seen as a symbol of democratic freedom and individual expression, my works explicitly takes up the themes of trauma, subjection and oppression as it relates to the current “War on Terror.” I think of my work as engaging with a marginalized tradition of abstraction associated with the works of Hermann Nitsch, Eva Hesse and the Gutaї group ─ artists who valued base materials, the excremental and entropic processes over purity, medium specificity and transcendental experience.

Grant Vetter