2015

 

I work with objects. Any object, whether new or old, has a history and is situated within a context. A process created it. Intent was embedded in it. It has a use or it lost its use.

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It is sometimes the object itself that I am interested in exploring, or that I am attracted to, but more often it is a combination of its existing and possible context that I investigate. Intent on my part is both unavoidable and desirable.

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Wherever an object is situated, layers of meaning are embedded in it. By recontextualizing - by creating an installation or a scenario - new meaning is established. This new meaning, or significance, is always based on what was already latent in the object itself.

 

By taking an object and bringing it into a situation - which always entails bringing it into contact with another object and an environment - the object, and now objects, are allowed to perform in a way they might not, or could not, have done before.

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I am rarely interested in working with just one object. Somehow the repeated statement, the slight variations within an ensemble or a field, is important for the meanings I need to access. Most often this is combined with a need to transform, or restate, an existing physical space.

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Multiple objects engage in time differently, allowing the viewer to observe and contemplate, freeing attention from its reliance on customary, or ordinary, webs of associations.

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The written language usually comes into play at one or another stage of the development of a piece. The way I search for, or investigate, objects, I search for, and investigate, ways of formulating thoughts, ways of perceiving, ways of reflecting; especially thoughts related to reflections within the fields of natural history and anthropology where they move into philosophy.

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For quite some time my focus has been on the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Bruno Schulz, Victor Segalen and Lefcadio Hearn. I often place actual writing in my installations, providing the viewer text fragments as well as visual information. Ultimately my work is about language; language as it weaves into nostalgia, beauty, celebration, death.

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