Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
“Like an archeologist I excavate fragments of the past and try to discern a narrative from them. Shards become “wholes,” not as something that once was whole in the past, like an antique vase, but as new forms in the present whose meaning can be symbolic, allegorical and/or a comment on current situations that concern me.
Another concern in my work is ‘Places I have been’ It does not only refer to cities where I had a residency or established a longtime studio, including Warsaw, Dar Es Salaam and Santa Fe, New York and Marseille. It also refers to places that are more incidental, like a cafe on Boulevard Chave in Marseille, where I heard ‘a woman crying in the bathroom’, or the attic in the house of one of my sisters in the Netherlands, where I found documents written by my father, who was the executor of the inheritance of family members murdered during WWII.
The carton and fabric dwelling, a compound, really, including a small garden, of a houseless man (Avenue de la Corse, Marseille). Noticing the housing circumstance of poor people and refugees elsewhere, makes me aware of whatever a being’s circumstance, he/she creates a home from whatever is in or around one’s surroundings. A gesture I try to recreate, albeit modestly and not in the circumstance of being forced to, in my serie ‘Dwellings’.”
The image of a boy on a bicycle in Dar es Salaam (when it was still so poor that even the rich were poor), wearing only half of a man’s shirt. Yet his shirt was more of a shirt than that of a CEO walking down Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
When I was still living in Amsterdam, before I left for New York in 1986, I was dreaming of a studio with a view of the Mediterranean sea, with its romance and historical richness. Once I had that studio, the Mediterranean started to appear in a serie of works, often abstracted, shapeshifting to an animal or even an object of desire. At the same time it was impossible to unsee the thousands of immigrants, trying to cross the Mediterranean from Northern Africa, drowning in that Sea. And to be unconcerned about their fate.