STATEMENT OF WORK

Lost and Found Castings:

These are lost and found castings of vintage candles, like teddy bears, pandas, little girls and other hippy "totems" I associate with the years in which my ideals and conciousness were formed, however ridiculous, idealistic, flawed and problematic that process was and continues to be.

They are sad, scary, and psychotic.

Both a criticism and fond remembrance of the past and sometimes present.

They recall the terrifying blunder of identifiers and ideals.

Cast Totems/sketches in metal:

These totems can sometimes seem like just a mass of fossilized slag, or  a sketch in bronze of forces all working against each other, an image of conflict and family.

Boney spheres represent people and the metal surface, the relationship plane. We roll about on cast bronze bumping into each other but never really getting inside of our molten centers.

These structures are built on suspect principles and ready to collapse, but do not...

Chess Pieces:

A chess set of totems is a framework in which to play with ideas. It's a practical use of this game of art and memory. The conceptual elements of the artworks have a vessel to contain them. Each set of 32 pieces is a one-of-a-kind lost wax casting. Usually the opposing colors also have other aesthetic elements that are in opposition, like organic verses geomentric, though the entire approch I use could be termed organic.

Mixed media anonymous painting collaborations:

These paintings were installed on the exterior of an industrial building in the arts district of downtown LA. The paintings are all roughly 4' x 5', and were made over the course of a 30 period. These works were important enough to me that I left them streched on the stercher bars, moved them from Long Island, to Philadephia, to the meatpacking district of NYC, and then to Brooklyn and finally Los Angeles. They were well travelled, cared for and apparently precious to me, being examples of periods of my artistic development that I was unable or unwilling to sell or part with.

On the first of the series the statement "the art i never made is the best" was stenciled on a lightly textured, somewhat reflective ground that was built up over many iterations of the work. The statement was meant, along with the placement of the pieces, as an invitation to collaborate/destroy the offered painting. Street artists subsequently added their mark to the painting. The city of LA anti-graffiti team also contributed by painting out the pieces entirely. And then the work continued until I "captured" the painting and brought it inside to hang in the common areas of the arts district building. I became an art trapper: I set the trap and capture the art when it happens. The old paintings were sacrified to find new ways of seeing. The old ideas were covered with new ones. You can stil see the layers of old work underneath.

The works destroy the preciousness of my former aesthetics.

Although what you see are gestural marks, the result is a conceptual artwork, created through the process of sacrifice and collaboration. This is not a painting made by a person or individual, but a group, a we, a society of anonymous givers. Here, a gestural painting becomes a conceptual artwork, a twist of the mind making this possible.