Due to chronic illness, my last traditional job was when I was 15 and working the cash at a vintage store. As a result, entering into the gallery space as an intern, I have repeatedly and unexpectedly found myself coming face to face with my own perceived incompetence. I know this isn't specific to me and my unique work history, but it is something most artists feel when we are pushed into these formal work spaces. As an artist, you train and educate for the purposes of art, and then you're asked to do math and taxes. Compared to the confidence I feel in my art, there is a constant struggle with the work space; with the haunting feeling I'm doing nothing right, I have no skills, and I'm not contributing. 

Painting is a difficult medium that requires a lot of practice to gain proficiency.  You can't expect your first attempt to yield amazing results, and yet in the workplace, we are often asked for our first tries to be presented, with consequences. Painting directly confronts my personal insecurities as an artist. My drawing and painting skills are poor. This is something that frustrates and complicates my practice on a number of levels. First, I have ideas suited to painting that I am unable to complete in a way that would satisfy. Second is the age-old preference for classic over the alternatives. My art practice normally consists of digital work and experimental film, and while many contemporary art galleries are becoming more open to alternative, non-commercial art forms, at the more casual level of coffee shops and art markets, I am completely excluded. Due to these reasons I've always had a jealousy of artists who work with these more accessible mediums. There is still a dominance of the art object, and I want in. For these reasons I have decided on painting, not only as a representation of my feelings of incompetence within a work context, but my own unstable position in the art world itself. 

I intend to take a structural approach, reserving two hours per week to work on the painting for the duration of the semester. As a structural, bureaucratic exercise, the two hours  must be spent painting,  and the painting is done when my hours are up, rather than this being a decision I need to make. In this way, I hope to echo how work is often done, hours prioritized over product, so that sometimes you have too much time, and sometimes not enough. I also chose the concept of re-creation rather than creating something new, for this reason. When entering a workplace, expectations are set by those who come before you, based on  their experience and skill, whether directly or tangentially. Furthermore, in professional spaces there is often a fear of the new, of creativity. These read as risks, just as my work sometimes does to galleries. By recreating a classical painting in a classical format, I am engaging with that desire for the tried-and-true that exists in all institutions. Both by mocking it - creating what will likely be a subpar copy of a ‘real’ painting - but also giving an earnest attempt to be able to function in that proven and approved space. 

no experience is about the mundane, bureaucratic routine as well as my expectations of myself, and how the intersection of the two create a feeling of incompetency. At the intersection of incompetency and bureaucracy, no experience explores failure through art reproduction, in a medium at which I am historically bad at. Whether the resulting art object will hold interest, or I am left with yet another piece of ephemera, I will successfully create a failure or a work of art, and in either case art will have been made.