KADAR BROCK | THE BROOKLYN RAIL

Jason Stopa: How does your subject matter find its way in? Some of them contain partially rendered images and phrases on the paintings, and the titles allude to a number of things, such as the soul, auras, and the self. Could you walk us through the decisions to reference that on the surface of the painting and the title? 

Kadar Brock: The titles are all pulled from source material, and the paintings are made on canvas with oil, then deconstructed by using window scrape, scraping away at them, and so each layer and each underpainting is typically pulled from this archive that I have been building since 2018. It primarily focused on the new age religious group called the Movement of Inner Spiritual Awareness, which my parents were involved in when I was growing up, and still are, so it was the religious ideological worldview that I was raised in. And I see the charismatic leader as a site or an example that I can tease all sorts of things out from, one of which is the idea of belief and disbelief. 

Kadar Brock & Jason Stopa —