For our very first commercial art show, Brad Blucher and I settled on the title "A Premature Retrospective for a number of reasons. We were not presenting a focused body of work, it was an eclectic collection of art that we had been working on for the last few years. It was sort of a retrospective of our work from high school and early University. Of course, having our very first show a "retrospective" is a little premature.

But the biggest reason for choosing this title was because... well, we found it kind of funny.

I was pretty obsessed with Gerhard Richter and Hans Hoffman in late high school and early university. In 2003, I think this obsession spilled over into just about everything I was painting. I was interested in the contrast between illusionistic space (perspective, shading, etc) and optical space (overlap, colour, texture). I was also interested in the integration of abstraction with representation.

This was an assignment where the class was required to make a collage, then make a painting based off of that image, and present the two side by side. I was never very good with collage materials and images, so I chose to make a digital collage. I found the experience very satisfying, and it came very easily to me. Little did I know that this kind of digital collage-making would become an integral part of my working process three years later.