STATEMENT OF WORK

I've uploaded three different projects, and each has its own statement.

1. Brains (drawings)

Most of the images I use represent a variety of life-forms and contain the essence and energy behind these phenomena. For me, it’s as if the biological phenomena of my brain has been transported through my body and hands onto paper; my drawings represent the wake of life as we move through the water of time. I am fascinated with scientific discovery as a source of creative inspiration. “Brains” furthers my exploration into the seeming dualities of nature and imagination in order to ask how society comes to terms with changes in our environment. 

2. Bodies (drawings)

I have long been inspired by the body — as metaphor, as subject, as medium. A few years ago, during a creative block, having made conceptual-based photographs that interrogate news media and its relationship to voyeurism and violence, I started drawing. I hadn’t done that for years, and even then it was connected to my painting practice. It felt good — internal rather than external, focusing on small bodies rather than big ideas. My fascination with biology was enhanced when introduced to scanning electron microscopic images when I was faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology. This led me to learn about microorganisms and create drawings based on this research. Now I frame and rearrange invisible images of disparate organisms in surreal ways that can seem unexpected and disorienting. I play with the idea that these life-forms might combine and form relationships with one another. Can we all just get along? These cohabitations are the inspiration for the biological universes I create on paper. My methods of creating are improvisational. I cut, combine, paste and draw onto found and re-photographed images of bacterial and viral particles, organs, brain activity and my own biomorphic abstractions, which overlap and float in space to evoke imagined worlds, seemingly lit from within.

3. War (conceptual-based photographs)

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was distraught with the knowledge that it was based on lies, and that most Americans believed those lies. One day, while looking at a news magazine, I picked up a video camera and through tears of grief ritualistically moved the macro lens against the glossy images of war and famine to “heal.” When I later viewed the video I could see frames of beauty that had been born from disaster. This was the beginning of these conceptual-based photographs that aim to penetrate the violence and voyeurism of news media. These photos are not collaged or computer-manipulated, but reveal a painterly aesthetic that re-frames the violence behind them. The abstraction of these ambiguously familiar images reflects the disconnected lens through which we (mostly) experience global events. Technology serves as both medium and message, and the images’ graininess and loss of focus are intended to raise questions rather than answer them. I show the artifice of the 4-color printing process by revealing the mechanical dots, glare from the light, blurriness, distortion, and (sometimes) random text bleeding in from the other side of the printed page. Media has long acted as a bridge, a means to engage beyond the immediacies of one’s own life. But in the age of the internet and social media, this constant flow of information — infinite yet curated, unbiased yet censored — often becomes overwhelming and deafening. And in an American culture that situates people as voyeurs, the visual drama that unfolds through the veil of the digital medium often enables us in “developed” countries to live a relatively safe but vicariously dramatic life at a distance. My aesthetic interest is in accentuating the distortion of a reality that is brought to us through the sideways lens of the doom scroll.