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My work in books, prints, and sculpture examines the unfolding narrative of my life in coded biographies, full disclosures, and personal mythologies. Four recent projects along these lines are The Book that Makes Itself, Mind Maps, The Story, and Spitting Into the Wind.
The book Mind Maps (2009) deals with the motivation behind art-making through elaborately constructed diagrams rendered on a typewriter and connected with pencil lines along themes such as Destiny and Fate, Positivity and Possibility, Art and Life.
The Story (2009) is an 83 page book created from images of iconic book covers of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I removed extraneous text and occasionally added words to the titles, matching the original typography. The resulting text is meandering and contemplative arranged so that as it is read from cover to cover, sentences begin to form that reference the original books' self help, counterculture fiction, and scientific best seller content.
Spitting into the Wind (2009) is an offset lithography poster that investigates the effect of Marcel Duchamp's infamous Fountain with references to the work of the same name by Bruce Nauman and lyrics from Jim Croce's You Don't Mess Around with Jim. Grotesque, yet beautiful, the image is a pause in space and time that inspires going with your instincts even if it hits you in the face.
FinallyThe Book that Makes Itself (2010), touches on ideas of continual documentation and production, education, artistic practice and self-inquiry. The Book itself is personified within an ongoing narrative that reads as a three act play; it exposes its own production through content and form and engages in a dialogue with me as its subject, agent and author.
In terms of historical precedents I am interested in the work of Romantic Conceptualists, and the extent to which conceptual art, or any art object, can carry emotion. The experience of exchange with another person is also pertinent to me, in a sense the exchange of a community at large. In conceptual work the artist's hand is archetypically absent — although it's important to me to make the author's hand visible. I read Marcel Duchamp's biography by Calvin Tomkins, the book put into perspective a way of life that I could apply to my own practice. I admire the legacy that he created with his Box in a Valise multiple by ensuring his work wouldn't be lost in time. |