ABOUT THE ARTIST | MORE IMAGES FROM THIS ARTIST | NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE

ARTIST STATEMENT: Besides taking a great deal of time to produce, my work is about the relationship I have with the things which have evolved it - the experiences, ideas, people and material objects which have grown my sensibilities so that I'm here as a witness/maker of objects of reflection. To that end the most important factor in my work is the things I am reflecting - the richness of the materials, their histories and their often humble, original purpose; the treasure of the many people I make work to honor: those artists and scientists whose work taught me and enriched my mind and those remarkable individuals whose seemingly ordinary lives have colored my experience like gardeners in an impressionist primer - the landscape I've been so fortunate to have walked through and learned from. At it's most essential, my work is only as good as my efforts to tip my hat to the blessings that have enriched it. And so my work is always about a "thank-you." It's about a hand shake in time.

It's my belief that no artist makes work alone, entirely from their own self-direction, inspired by their own, individual talent. I'm rather of the belief that those of us fortunately predisposed with creative minds are only good at listening in on a "party-line"...a long conversation of evolving designs unmapable by satellite or antenna, linguistically indescribable even by sciences as inclusive of variable as String Theory's elastic boundaries. This conversation is a limitless cord of golden messages left along the way like notes tacked to the trees in a fairy tale forest of a thousand translations of a million dictionaries with signposts pointing in a trillion directions. Here's Mozart's scribbles and here's Creek Charlie Field's graffited Virginia house - the wonders along the way.

To my way of thinking, the constant surprise of the arts is it's continuity of community, how it never goes stale but remains alive, life to life, mind to mind. This is so simple and so vast that's it's a constant well so deep it turns into the sky and wraps itself around my efforts like Winsor McKay's Little Nemo tumbling through his kaleidoscopic slumbers at the switchboard of connections to answers and questions allotted to me...my share to puzzle over during my years here on Joni's Mitchell's "marbled bowling ball." Whether I'm working in photography or with jointed figures in glass boxes, either the imagery, materials or literary references in the piece are so connected to the fabric of so many other pieces that, even though they may appear very different, the network of woven connections is binding throughout. I've referred to my work as "minimalist baroque" because I'm very careful to set limit's to each work's structure even though I'm often drawing on an encyclopedia of influences. Even Little Nemo needed his rectangles.

Some forms dominate my work: boxes of various kinds are one. I was greatly influenced by Joseph Cornell, but also architecture, having worked on building restoration for many years. Figures, mannequins and puppets are another focus of my work. As a facsimile of life, a puppet triggers the contradictory sensations underlying the experiencing of any illusion. Puppets are sculptures that suggest the borderline between life and death. They require us to suspend practical disbelief in the power of material to be animate. The fact of a puppet's potential for movement is there, built into it's mechanism whether it moves or not. This power to imitate life is part of the mental complex one experiences when looking at a puppet. It's a drama that's hard to avoid - a private one-act play, in a sense, that presents itself the moment you're looking at an object made to look back at you. You're naturally drawn to an unnatural intimacy. And it's this little drama that takes place with this form of art that compels me to keep working with it, however enormous and symphonic are the multiple factors of production sometimes required by some of these large-scale works. At heart I'm a theater director.

The placement of these figures in boxes is inspired by automata, carousel and wax museum figures, sideshow images and lost theaters of magic. Based on the tragicomic characters from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte - the origin of western theater - and placed within the structural framework of the German Wunderkabinet - the origin of "the museum" - the work is greatly influenced by European precedents. Nevertheless it rings with hauntings from the peanut gallery of 20th century Americana: Whispering Jack Smith, Al Jolson, King Oliver, Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, George Herriman and countless others from the golden age of American popular culture, keep the work, at heart, vaudevillian and treading the old boards - with the eccentricities of folk artists such as James Hampton and Simon Rodia acting as resident archangel reminders of the value of private battles which sometimes must be waged with humble materials for inscrutable inquiries.

I like to think of the labor-intensive development of much of my work as requiring a gestation, in a sense, which through such a slow and evolving process of manufacture becomes woven into the fabric of the work in the way that a concentration of energy can often create synapse - or rather, a clever sleight of hand can often create a fraudulent miracle.


Artwork copyright © 2003 - 2006 each Respective Artist.
Contents copyright © 2006 COlab Projects Group, Inc.