GENERALIZATIONS

I can be beguiled and repelled simultaneously by the character of my environment. There is magnetism to the visual cacophony of my city, rife with an extravagance of historic material culture.  This excess of stuff confronts me, almost relentlessly. While I surely absorb the stimulation unconsciously, I also save fragments of the most personally compelling detritus for its experiential mnemonics and tactile enticement.

 

Perhaps we are all accumulators at heart.

 

The selected evidence of age, decay, residue, and profuse quantities of discards seem to echo the energy and stimulation, the problems and issues, the dynamics of my neighborhood.

 

This is the palette with which I corroborate the meaning and content of my work.

 

They may also imply larger problems­ – those which all humans share.  We all seek safety, well-being, sustenance, and peace. My artwork is a formulated method of acknowledging the discomforting personal and societal stories of our time – ethnicity, intolerance, impersonality, social ills, and blight.

 

My research is deeply engaged in the investigation of the particular places that I encounter in my daily life.  I decode places in order to in-code an experience.  This often involves the commingling of devastating realism with a buoyant spirit of hope.  My works are about the landscape of renovation and repair, and of making spaces accessible.

 

I take material and engage it in a way that makes the work rough, but managed, manipulated, made. I take the dynamic, the idea, the visceral quality of the environment and have used it as a formulated method in my work.

 

Borrowed, but managed, engaged.  It’s high end.  It’s formulated to be thought about.  It’s formulated to have a message.  

 

There is a question, a challenge and a resolution that draws forward, in a small way, a facsimile of the landscape of the made, but makes it manageable, comprehensible, and small so that you feel the sense of individual maker, manipulator, a personality out in the world, transforming it.