House and Home Series
1) Contrasting materials, creating textures, manipulating forms, mixing found materials with traditional painting. We are witness to a constantly changing landscape that mirrors technological advancements. The landscape, even the urban landscape, is organic, deteriorating, rejuvenating, repurposing. Because we live in a time of major technological upheaval, this change is rapid. Materials become artifacts quickly. The work is archaeological, sampling the textures, colors, and forms of a changing environment to piece together clues about the life we are living.
2) America, in particular, promotes a dream of security based on home and land ownership. We founded a country on the idea. It is what the New World represented to many. America was to be a utopia. We have nearly created a religion out of the business of home ownership; yet, ownership is a nebulous term. A house is a shelter. Shelter is a basic human need. A home is something more. The birdhouse symbolizes the concept, home. The bird makes a nest for its home. We create a nesting place for birds that is anthropomorphic. The destructed birdhouse shows that the home is impermanent. Natural and humanmade disasters, not to mention the real estate bubble, all attest to that. We go and gather sticks and string to constantly furnish and maintain our homes. We are recorded on television participating in these activities--the news, home shows-- not dissimilar to nature documentaries.
4) We tend to see ourselves as outside of nature or the environment, at odds with it, at war with it, or trying to get back to it. Using tools, developing agriculture, and altering the food chain do not make us separate from nature or the environment. What if our cities are the equivalent of anthills, our language not so different than bird song? Regarding houses, weapons, mechanisms: birds have feathers, turtles have shells, and fish have fins and scales, affording them protection and mobility. Doesn’t a house do the same thing for us? Some houses move, but even the ones that do not create social mobility, a kind of conceptual mobility like a bird(house) is conceptual or symbolic.
5) Human inventions mimic natural phenomena. I am fascinated with the way animals and objects move through matter. A fish moves through water as a bird moves through the air. Similarly a helicopter's propeller moves through the air; a spike moves through wood; a plow moves through soil; a needle moves through fabric, etc. All of these actions are violent in a sense. There are repercussions. Bringing consequences and benefits, actions and reactions into balance produces tension, and tension allows us to do incredible things. Tension may be pleasant or discomforting. Sometimes balance is horrifying,dissonance reassuring. Dissonance is not imbalance.
6) Art, music, and writing are all about bringing things into a tension-creating state of balance. Playing music is making vibrations through striking, blowing, or rubbing. The instrument catches these vibrations like a sail. A guitar is a box to catch and broadcast the vibration of striking the strings, and a saxophone captures and broadcasts the vibration of breath across a reed. The mechanisms humans have created in order to shape sound in specific ways are remarkable. Music is strange and wonderful.