Consequences of Competing Narratives
My new collages inhabit a space between abstraction and figuration,
anthropology and storytelling, cultural and personal myths: where belief mingles with magical thinking. Utilizing landscape and portrait as a point of departure—a visual anchor—allows me to pursue my pervasive themes through images: psychological, psychedelic, erotic undertones; esoteric and occult symbols; the illusion of impossible situations. Simultaneous narratives are a desired result. I approach collage from an intuitive process, attempting to create images like visual hallucinations, a kind of delirium, all the while inhabiting and
exploring that intimate space between viewer and image, and creating an
experience that rewards slow looking. Images of hands and their iconography of gesture are prevalent in these collages. They grasp and release fractured, incomplete words in the shape of spheres. To me, this is a metaphor for contemporary life: an inability to fully articulate reality, the failure of inept language to conjure miracles; the realization that all we have in the end are stories to pass along.
It is important that the viewer knows the work is generated by hand. Contemporary magazines are my source material, anthropological documents from which I excavate necessary parts, to breathe new life into such materials. I employ drawing, appropriation, and frottage, which involves sanding—a gesture of revealing what’s beneath.