Image: A Wish, 2010 Pigment print on canvas, 16” x 11”

Artist Statement:

     The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."
— Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)

     Buckminster Fuller stated that words are simply the tools that we use to communicate our experiences - thus communicating the universe and attempting to find some order. This attempt to fashion order and find the connectedness of shared experiences has driven my work for quite a while.
     With text, I seek to draw links between the verbal and the visual. Not only am I considering the context of the words, but also the aesthetics of the words themselves. Their visual weight and impact.  My photography and drawings are often used as reference tools, collecting images of the routine and the mundane. They help me search for transitional events and spaces.
     The Parting of the Ways represents my current preoccupation with breaking the threads that connect us to one another. Breaking from relationships, family ties, friendships and eventually life itself are quietly pondered in the installation. For example, the floral images are of discarded and forgotten synthetic flowers left to slowly disintegrate in and around grave sites. The images symbolize our yearning to remain connected to lost loved ones but only obliquely. While the piece Unsettled, deals directly with the loss of a feckless and idle father and the consequences of breaking patriarchal ties.
     The Parting of the Ways is deliberately fragmented and splintered to offer glimpses into personal and archetypical experiences of separation, detachment, and eventually letting go.