RECONCILIATION

A REVISIONIST’S DRAFT

Craft Alliance Grand Center June 2009

I have found that I am not solely a studio artist.  I know how to work in a studio and I’ve got lots of conventional studio skills but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out.  I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.

I am a resident of Hyde Park, a North St. Louis neighborhood.  I’m not an outsider or an insider and I still have the great privilege to talk.  What I am seeing in my neighborhood is evidence of a collapsed system. My research is about working with entropy – taking apart a system and working toward disorder.  The sites in which I choose to work present a sore spot.  They are physical proof of the destructive powers of the world, and serve as a concrete example of the wider context of social failure.

My work has become a dialectic that fuses architecture and site, living experience, and the making of jewelry objects as artifacts of an experience. This has been achieved by treating material on multiple layers of scale and behavior, altering the integrity of built structures as a way to compromise and transform. 

I employ photography as an intervention on my chosen sites, and use building material in a way that disengages it from its original structure and system. There is a revealing nature in their revision. I am releasing associations about sites I deal with.  You can only see these things once I have taken them apart, ennobled them, and resurrected them.  There is an awareness that I am trying to bring about.  By bringing pieces of the system and reassembling them, I demonstrate that as the system breaks down, it reveals much about its impossibility.  My experiences have been open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable.

There is an urgency, surgical skill, and neutrality to the small works I create.  The true message in my work is in the craft and what I can do with metals and material on a small scale.  Yet, at this point I could not make objects without participating in these other defining activities.  In a sense, I am ending with my beginning, and am beginning to talk about how these small objects have given voice to a wider practice.  The work I present here is an attempt to reconcile the evolving concentric circles of the tourism that I employ along the way of working to reveal an object.