STATEMENT OF WORK

Working primarily in collage, drawing, and low-relief paper sculpture, I make art that resembles picture frames, badges or emblems—those things that memorialize, commemorate or signify a particular allegiance. I borrow elements from decorative traditions associated with late Victorian and early twentieth century American craft, yet there are many contemporary iconographic and ornamental ingredients that ultimately situate these works in the present day.

Both the three dimensional paper pieces and drawings owe a debt to American Tramp Art frames from the turn of the twentieth century. Whittled from recycled cigar box wood, these works were multi-layered showpieces that housed important family photographs. My earliest constructions echoed much of the look of the original frames but crucially substituted paper for wood and left the photo “windows” empty. More fragile, entirely covered with graphite, and absent a photograph at their centers, they invite a dialogue about who or what we choose to keep in memory. Subsequent works have complicated the symbolic reading of my subject by replacing the standard rectangular or oval photo window with grillwork, keyholes, or mazes.

I am interested in exploring the historical divide between the craft-based, decorative and vernacular strains of art and that of the high-minded, canon-conscious work produced by academically trained makers. Through the use of appropriated patterns, stylized pictorial forms and text, my works could be described paradoxically as either “pop” or “folk” yet aim to be a robust hybrid of the two. I strive to let the language of abstract pattern and ornament become narrative. These works are personal memory containers for me, but I aim for them to be strange little monuments to the act of memorialization itself.