I am interested in filtering abstract painting through a gendered and culturally-specific lens, infiltrating the notion of the "pure" and universal abstract painting from the oblique angle of the periphery. I use the visual codes and conventions of abstraction the assertion of the two-dimensionality of the canvas, the attention to the formal qualities of the painting and yet I redeploy them in an attempt to pull them from their roots and fracture what is signified. Thus the relationship of visual referents to adjectives used by a heterogeneous group of abstract painters to describe their work e.g., sublime, tragic, timeless, relationless, pure, transcendent, religious, spiritual, is severed in my work. I reinscribe abstraction with a set of gendered meanings. The idea of self-expression through abstraction assumes a solipsistic notion of self reiterated with the artist's gesture; in my work self is assumed, in a feminist sense, as relational, and therefore gesture derives from a relational ground. I also engage directly with the notion of universality in abstraction, in order to expose a few underlying assumptions. Modernism's large debt to the notion of the "primitive," used as critical ground for what became a marker of cultural development makes it epistemologically problematic, if not impossible, for me to legitimately engage with abstraction in painting, since I am an instance of the "primitive" in modernism's eyes.