Artist Statement

I find myself interested in work that seeks kinship among media and methods of making.  I am drawn to ways of working that deploy both discipline and an openness to serendipity. And I find myself using often, but not always, the materials, processes, and impulses of photographic ways of making and seeing in my mark making. These aesthetic and material choices allow me to consider transgression and tradition and permission and pleasure within the practice of genres in art, and explore how those relate more broadly to cultural customs of communication and control.   

In 2023, I completed a residency at Officina Stamperia Del Notaio in Tusa, Sicily that sparked a new body of work which began with language of the road: construction fences, chains, ropes, and, especially, the wordless “universal” code of the directional signs, how it implicates bodies and the body, and how that interacts with the individual codes and dictates of a single body. The work has continued beyond the scope of the original project, taking on different fascinations, both quotidian—photographs, scribbled drawings and notes, found items— and abstract—large fiber-based double-sided photogram works.

Salt for Salt is a project I started in summer 2022 in Sardinia that works with photographs, largely made on runs, holographic material borrowed from my Reflections series, and a hand-punched Morse Code transcription protocol — mostly Q code and quotes from literature—to build a one-sided narrative “conversation.”  There’s a lot of repetition, halving, and mirroring, and the visuals include references to outmoded forms of communication, such as antennae, telephone poles, and light houses, as well as vistas that feel post-card like, evoking as always, the absent other.  This is a body of work about trying by all these different languages and methods to connect across distance and darkness, and then choosing to disconnect.

In my Colorwash series, I make ephemeral paintings, using gouache, pastel, oil sticks, and natural cleaning products, sandwiched between layers of acetate — a material nod to my photographic background. I have to surrender to chance when I add each layer of acetate, as it alters the paintings.  In my Reflections series, which I work in tandem and revisit occasionally, I fashion makeshift setups from reusable holographic craft materials.  I document both sets of temporary works using analog sheet film and a 4x5 large format camera. I am rigorous in documentation and I let myself make photographs of my paintings and setups—I focus selectively; I use the camera movements; I choose my perspective, and chase the brief animation of each piece.  I work quickly with the plodding camera and I hold my breath, pursuing, if I am fast, a single exposure before a painting slides clear down the acetate or before wind—or a tug of the dog’s leash—can topple the work.

The Colorwash/Reflections series follows in the lines of the Surrealist photographers, particularly its female artists, the Abstract Expressionists, with their meditative, exuberant gestures, and the Color Field painters who showed us the visceral experience of color. It follows also Corita Kent’s love of color and her devotion to plork.

I studied literature in undergrad and then went to graduate art school, ostensibly for writing, at a school that allowed for blurry lines among disciplines. So literary influences run deep, too—Annie Dillard and the lyrical essayists, whose asking of questions and acts of essaying—attempting— to pursue answering those questions is foundational to my approach. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, whose truth-telling centers on a world of possibilities is a guiding force. Eve Babitz, whose unabashed delight in living life is a continual inspiration. I read a lot. I am also profoundly and daily impacted by the rich and varied work I take in while art advising.