Clif Koufman

I moved from Boston to North Carolina as a young child. From my new bedroom, I heard cicadas for the first time and knew I was somewhere different. Growing up Jewish in the South, I often felt both inside and outside the place that was shaping me. As a kid, I loved running through the galleries of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, surrounded by things I didn't always understand but wanted to see.

Music later became my primary creative language. Decades of playing and studying rhythm, including with master drummers in West Africa, taught me to think through repetition, variation, density, space, and improvisation.

Today & Yesterday brings these experiences into a daily visual practice. Over more than two hundred days, I have created more than two hundred works across digital media, marker, watercolor, photography, and film. I often work improvisationally, following what interests me while leaving room for the work to become something I didn't expect.

Across the series, I find myself returning to density and openness, obscuring and revealing, repetition and interruption. I’m interested in making work that can hold more than one reading. Something that changes depending on who is looking and how long they stay with it.