The finished pieces:
Flying in Dreams
Over a 30 year period this thing I've been doing has undergone extensive transformation, and this inquiry strives to capture not only the exhilaration/danger/mechanics that have defined it but also the process by which it has iterated from clumsiness to proficiency to emotional/experiential complexity.
Process:
(1) I'd attempted a few pieces like this - i.e. layers, transparency, moving parts - and thought that using a similar approach here would gave an ethereal, dreamy, dangerous feel to match the feeling of flying when dreaming, so that everything here floats or hangs or moves. (2) Muybridge: his motion studies seemed perfect as a way to show 2 of the different flying techniques - flapping and rising / running and jumping - I've used, (3) tying two pieces - the "flight panel" in the front and the "tornado dream" panel in the back together with weights, fishing line and pulleys lets the viewer play with the piece: there's an inherent fear you're going to break the damned thing that hangs so fragile-y from the wall, so this, to, helps capture the feel, (4) adding a convex lens lets you "see into the dream" (the tornado dream) when it's lowered into view, and (5) the base panel is "dissolved" by using layered text on black background; on the flip side are overlays of many of the stills used in the Muybridge-like panels. They're kind of creepy to look at...
Components:
2 hanging panels
Front
Back
Tornado dream (Slides down into view through lens when hanging weights are pulled to lift "flight" panel)
Inspiration: Muybridge
Dirty
We react - e.g. full embrace, freeze, fight, flight - when confronted with provocative situations and our reactions are a strong indicator of where we're at in a particular process. This inquiry takes one of the more provocative objects of our times and puts it (and you) into the same visual space The act of presenting it multiple times (24) can be suggestive of habitual IV drug use or chemotherapy, debilitation/rehabilitation, recreation/remission, narcotrafficking/pharmo, relapse/relapse. What beauty can come from the darker realms of experience - e.g. addiction or chemotherapy? What horrible side effects are associated with medicinals? What is dirty?
The process: (1) 24 syringes are filled with inks, blood or a pharmaceutical, (2) a braid of my hair (sheared off in 1991) is added as a humanizing touch, (3) a poem (also from 1991) is cut into 24 strips, placed randomly - along with syringes and hair - into a liquid rubber matrix, (4) profanity is written on the mirror, which is then placed at the back. The end result: you see yourself in a field of what looks like bloody syringes - and are drawn closer (against a revulsive feeling) to read the poem. Yes, I am a wicked man.
Vagina Penis Cock Cunt
The images in this image barrage - ranging from medical illustration to line art erotica to hentai porn to advertising to vintage and hardcore porn - were chosen to provoke a personal inquiry into the questions of Where are the lines demarcating erotica v. pornography, medical procedures v. sexual act, art v. indecency? and How personal, universal and contextual are those demarcations? The images were embedded in 4 successive layers of liquid epoxy (which takes forever to dry)
The Lost Child
Over the course of the year in which one of my former studio mates had an accident with their child, waded through the molasses of a cold-and-calculating impersonal medical system, saw hope, then lost him on the rising sun of the first day of this year, I began to apply this heartbreaking narrative to a vexing image I had picked up in the American South in 2005 after stumbling onto an image of a child on their memorial marker in a local cemetery in Amsterdam Old South. It makes use of the volume created by the curved piece of glass.
The iterative process was (1) pulling out a can of blue spray paint and immersing the couple in "rising water," since it seemed like they were drowning in sadness, (2) at a nearby cemetery seeing the image of a child who had died, and thinking of this as the thing that would explain the couple's grief, (3) making use of the volume created behind the curved piece of glass I created a dam/dike, and filled the lower half with liquid rubber, setting into it an assortment of of bones, fossils and the image of the child - all of this coming to represent the past, or memory, (4) using rusty razor blades to signify emotional state - his pointing outward (anger), hers pointed in (pain).
Hometown
At high school graduation one of the "losers" of our cohort stole the day with his banshee howl and arms-a-windmilling exit from the public space the rest of us were stuck in like insects in amber. This piece is an inquiry into the David Lynchian-underbelly of growing up in a small town, of the creeping decay, emotional subterfuge and violent undercurrents that hold the residents hostage, slave and victim.
Process: (1) take an old postcard of a small town in Illinois, (2) transform its landscape into one of a horror show of profanity and grotesque faces, (3) add in a poem (almost invisible...the plan is to redo this on a cover sheet of glass in glow-in-the-dark ink) - Hometown - which defines the underbelly of life in a small town.
Pathological Procrastination Syndrome
The last in this series - and, appropriately, still incomplete - makes use of - in ironic, iconic, personal and journalistic fashion - 90 images in 3 categories (The World, The Seven Deadly Sins and Work) to explain why it's been 25 years since the artist's last formal exhibition of work as he stumbles, is diverted, is riveted, barraged and sidelined and distracted.
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