With the semiotic construct of Winston Newport I set out to represent a ‘Late Modernist’ persona and to signify a specific methodological practice. With its reference to cigarette brand names and Hollywood packaging the name suggested a business or corporation involved in producing and marketing art objects. Within the context of the Winston Newport persona I was allowed a measurable degree of freedom to draw upon, and reedit a set of Modernist and Late Modernist tenets while recontextualizing them within the populist ideology of television, graphics, and fashion media.

With Untitled Composition in Paint #1, #2, and #3, 1986, I strove to reconstitute and distill Modernist Constructivist sources into randomly floating lexical wall decor. The text (as image) was to be unreadable yet the linguistic sign was to remain stylistically pure. In the example of Untitled Color Chart Composition, 1986, Modernist abstraction was to become the theoretical aesthetic prototype for a Kodak photographic color chart. This work was made of fabric so the material metaphor of painting-as-design would be misread through the conceptual vocabulary of photography only to be re-revealed as functioning interior design.