Artist's Statement / Bio
Until my early twenties, I lived in southwestern Utah. I am still in the process of deconstructing my childhood. My art is part of that process. Maybe I am old enough now to begin to understand the dialectics of life: we had poverty and food stamps, and a small wood-burning stove to heat my childhood home, and I had a ditch in the front yard, a dog who littered yearly, freshly-baked homemade bread and foothills to wander.
I have been taking photographs for nearly forty years. For most of that time my work centered on classical, single-image monochromatic photography of nudes, landscapes and abstractions. Within the last four years I have been using collage/montage/mosaic techniques to create larger pieces and polyptychs with both thematic and subject matters that are meditations on politics, identity, religion and the state of being in America today. The work I am doing now is far more time and labor intensive than single-image photography, especially when creating mosaic polyptychs. But the benefit of this process is a greater intimacy with the piece I am creating; it follows the stages of a relationship: the prospect and excitement of newness, counting the hours until one can reunite with one’s new love; becoming enmeshed in one’s new other; losing oneself in one’s new other; persevering through the doldrums and monotony; becoming bored with that which was once exciting; a hiatus of feelings for one’s new love. And then, looking back at all the time that was put into making something real, organic, vocal and alive, one sees the beauty and one falls deeper in love.
I describe my recent work as unsettling, not in content, but in outcome. That is to say, although there is a subject-background component, with the multiplicity of perspectives, I hope to draw your attention away from the entirety of the piece, to notice the interplay of those perspectives and how they distract and distort what you think should be there. I don’t want your eyes or your mind to find a resting point. We have evolved to see the world as seamless; my work distorts that view.
The series, Offense of Legacy, is an opprobrium on both the ubiquity of the word and the pursuit of immorality and the didacticism of the dead. We leave behind bones and ashes and nouns–things. Even if we have children, we don’t leave them. They may have memories of us; some of our things may haunt them or bring joy. But they are not ours. They are their own. We do them a disservice by foisting our feeble wish of immortality while dressed in the counterfeit robes of legacy.
