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Statement
My works, as much as they reflect a complacent embrace of planned obsolescence, focus on a playful narrative of how objects define our culture and our time. I am curious about how our histories are shaped by objects we posses, share, discard, collect, and hold dear. Though my works reflect a range of media, from large scale installations, to smaller prints on paper, they are united with a cast of characters, a mix of objects from high and low culture filtered through an anxious sense of humor. Ranging from beer cans and building debris, to ancient urns and human remains, these characters help tell stories that span the intimate moments of individuals to the grand disasters shared by everyone. Printmaking and its history of creating high art, popular art, and mass produced consumer goods, becomes a means of production both physically and conceptually for my work. Over the past several years my creative research has grown significantly, broadening from a response to environment and disaster, to become aligned with the western tradition of still life, and its use of objects as proxies to consider human issues. Simplifying my artwork around the idea of objects has opened channels to explore ecology, art history, archeology, and memorial, while printmaking has become a perfect vehicle to consider issues of high and low, ephemerality and permanence, history and fiction, digital and analog. I find the provenance of the objects we hold in our hands a fascinating reminder that history has always been constructed from what has survived, through careful planning, accidental circumstance, or willful evolution. Through my work I carve a wide path of concerns, calling to question those objects that ultimately define our cultures and our histories through the stories they can offer us. |
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