ARTIST STATMENT
From experimenting with materials like water and light, dabbling in robotics, and mastering industrial machining, I relentlessly pursue new forms of expression. I grew up among geographic and cultural clashes, biracial, moving abruptly in childhood from the Alaskan north to the Texan deep south. I believe this has informed my decades-long interest in combining seemingly disparate disciplines. As I look at the way that my art practice has evolved over the years, I see something persistent in the way I combine clashing time periods, cultures, and processes, to ultimately ask what it means to create, what it means to search for purpose, and what it means to die.
My artistic process in my early career and in graduate school was characterized by a frenzied experimentation with materials, always inspired by my desire to learn about a new or strange process, to aggressively push myself to work within extreme self-imposed constraints. It was not popular at the time to make "formal" work--work in which appearance matters, in which composition and form and color are deeply considered--but I stuck to my instinct there and followed the advice of my mentors, who encouraged me to create and then determine meaning retroactively, if at all. I gleefully gathered twisted metal detritus from abandoned buildings in Providence and poured molten glass on top--I used simple programming languages to switch solid state relays on and off in order to pump bubbling water through winding tubes woven across my studio ceiling--I built walls in front of windows to concentrate light in the room until it was nearly blinding, but only for a single minute each day. A piece that is a microcosm of this time, I believe, is Mnemonic/Periodic--a piece in which I decided to make ten palm-sized sculptures each day for three weeks. These pieces were mostly assemblages of found objects, but I was attempting not to repeat myself in a significant way with materials, process, or compositional elements. When I had finished this stage and hundreds of sculptures littered my studio floor, I shut down my studio for a week, and then attempted to draw the sculptures from memory. I used the order in which I remembered the sculptures, as well as the glitches in my memory, to install the work in a periodic-table-like grid. The piece was a bit aburdist, a bit challenging, and very much about the artistic process of creation. How is it that such a specific and personal aesthetic still managed to emerge, even when I attempted something "new" each time, to paint such a consistent portrait of the artist?
The drive of learning and exploration continues to form the foundation of my work, but it has become even more personal over time. Middle age has punched me in the gut. Certain windows for me--namely having children--passed through inaction and the youthful belief that time would infinitely stretch onwards. I learned my mother was terminally ill. Chronic pain became a part of everyday life, and I lost mobility, literally internalizing the lack of control I had over my own body. For nearly five years, I slept walked.
And then last year I started to wake up again. I looked at my marriage, at my beautiful house, at the life I had created in a daze, and I realized that I had no choice but to leave. And when I did, I started to recognize myself again. I saw my self from Mnemonic/Periodic: the one who relentlessly searches, but still finds enormous satisfaction in the discoveries along the way. I am alive, I used to sing. It's just that this time around, a boundless grief had found its way in, weaving its tendrils into everyday interactions. I had not realized how much of my youthful confidence--swagger, even-- had come from my belief that I had control over life, over time. And when I could finally catch a glimpse of what it means to be mortal and for everyone I love, also, to be mortal, I learned that this is what my work had been about all along.
Since this began to dawn on me, I have focused my attention on materials that transmit and reflect light— glass and metal—to highlight impermanence. I have simplified by ignoring the third dimension and focusing on (mainly) two-dimensional wall panels, returning to my early interest in composition, form, line, and color, but now incorporating very specific imagery. In my layered, translucent glass pieces, I have made a series that is an ode to my lost home, to my desperate attempt at permanence. Windows, skylights, and mirrors reflect light in the images as physical light in the room passes through the layers of glass, but the architectural interiors also feature vertical lines in the form of banisters, wall paneling, and window treatments. Part of the seduction of the home was that it was a prison, too, and it is fitting that this imagery was created with hundreds of pieces of glass that were heated to a molten, honey-like state until they merged. The transformation is frozen in time, but it could always change again.
My metal work also alludes to my past life through certain details like tiles behind a cactus, a fountain surrounded by palms, a magnolia branch that was cut to open up a view of the bay--but it is much more fantastical and expansive, the landscapes nodding to an age-old artistic tradition but also incorporating the surrounding environment through mirror-like reflectivity. Depicting objects that traditionally absorb light--leaves, bark, and foliage--in metal causes them to morph into something new. Much like the water that also frequently appears in this body of work, the trees and foliage and plants become almost malleable, glittering and undulating as the viewer walks past. The work changes as its environment changes, as the light passes across the sky outside and the artificial lights come on inside, one by one.