AS220 Main Gallery, Providence, RI, January 2016
Wandering/Wondering: The Eye and the Imagination at Play
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Although I use many common referents and symbols in my work in eclectic ways, I am not posing a puzzle for the viewer to solve or a cryptic message to decode. What I am trying to do in this exhibition is to inspire the viewer to imagine diverse ways of contemplating the relationship between different kinds of experience and perceptions of reality.
“Into the Flames” Oil Painting and Photographs
The descriptive references in the oil painting on canvas “Into the Flames” (92” X 53”) are to recognizable flora, fauna and landscape forms, yet in my work I choose to emphasize partial details of these forms. Detailed bare branches in the deep and far distance echo with the stamen of a very close and immediate flower. Together the individual petals of flowers converse with a distant flaming sky. All of these marks and images exist in their own moments and space, yet in their spatial and temporal relations they create coherent narratives about the interconnectedness of all forms of life.
As I proceeded to develop the oil painting “Into the Flames,” I took digital photographs of different sections at different stages in the development of this artwork. Displaying them as individual pleximounted photographs (11 ½” X 17”), I have chosen to arrange them as single photographs, diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs and as a polyptych of 19 photographs. In this way, I am deconstructing and reassembling the original oil painting to represent the emerging artwork in an entirely new medium with an entirely new structure. This is one way I have sought to “re-present” my work to further my artistic goal of encouraging a plurality of ways of imagining the connections among experience, perception and representation.
“Daydreaming” Prints and Photographs
The “Daydreaming” archival prints and photographs shown here represent a selection of works from a larger series. This series broadly queries the values of consumerism and personal possession.For each photograph in the series, I asked friends and family to bring me the sundry bric-a-brac that inhabit their households, so I could create diverse tablescapes that pose the following question: “What is the value of the things we possess, hoard, store or that simply form the unnoticed background of our daily lives? Junk, stuff, kitsch or things of great significance?”
“Here and Gone Septaptych” Oil Paintings
The seven small oil paintings on wood – “Out There,”“Blooming,” “Gone Fishing,” “Conjuring,” “Flocking,” “What Follows” and“Endurance” – constitute the septaptych I call “Here and Gone.” Each painting presents a different perspective on the overarching theme of the work – the fluid relationship that obtains between a sense of permanence and a sense of transience in our experiences, perceptions and understandings. At any given moment,the ghosts that have gone, the ghosts that will return and the ghosts that have yet to appear, haunt our existential “present”.