He is an Amsterdam occupier since 2009. While much of his creative energy has been funneled into left-brained pursuits, nonetheless he’s churning out a creative body of work relentlessly – e.g. a collection of 30,000+ negatives/slides from 30+ years of pre-digital photography; blogging, and multimedia concoctions littering the landscape. He’s lived in almost 50 places, has had more than 25 bicycles stolen; and has been making art since he was weaned.
For this show he digs deep into the dark spaces of the psyche and experience, exploring the intricacies of disease, dreaming, dementia, drug use and disabilities.
websites:
La carrière de Mark Swindle s’étend de l'architecture au design de site internet pour l’université de Northwestern à Chicago en passant par, la création de plus 8000 illustrations médicales techniques pour les encyclopédies; la création d’un magasin de disques - The Quaker Goes Deaf - avec Elisa Keir et Charlie Edwards à Chicago; 4 ans dans le monde en ligne / interactif dans le années de prospérité… Il est installé à Amsterdam depuis 2009. Bien qu'une grande partie de son énergie créatrice ait été canalisée vers des travaux intellectuels et analytiques, il s’atelle néanmoins sans relâche à des créations plus personnelles et graphiques comprenant entre autre : une collection de 30.000 négatifs / diapositives de plus de 30 ans de photographie argentique, la création de blogs, et concoctions multimédia qui jonchent aujourd’hui le paysage numerique.
Il a vécu dans près de 50 lieux, c’est fait voler plus de 25 vélos. C’est un artiste depuis l’enfance. Pour cette exposition, il plonge dans les coins retranchés de sa psyché et de ses sombres expériences, pour explorer les subtilités de la maladie, du rêve, de l'usage de drogues et des disfonctionnements.
30 images in 30 days:
2/14 the Studio Is Ready
We got the keys November 23, started construction December 2, and now that the house project is done I've got 30 days to knock out 5 pieces.
2/15 Flying in Dreams:
glass-board-glass w/ ceramic tile, lenses and pulleys exploring fascination with/25 years of various techniques used in flying. Initially this began with flapping of arms, then running and leaping then taking off; the with a jump forward and falling forward into flying; and the last few years flying with fingertip control and will. Early on I was embarrassed to be seen; later i would swoop through cityscapes and around buildings, sort of showing off. I often fly inside of buildings. By far the most amazing of these dreams was the time swooping over a landscape of rolling green hills and flying between the dozen or so tornadoes flitting around...
2/16 Exploding Tempered Glass:
One of the pieces of glass shown in the photo above exploded when it bumped the table as I was measuring out the positioning where the drilled holes will be. Lesson learned: don't use tempered glass; explore the best techniques for drilling glass.
2/17 Iterations:
The steam from a bath (meant to sooth the back injury I got from falling down the stairs Thursday) taken at our old apartment on Bloemgracht left a writing surface on the window.
2/18 Muybridge:
At 2am it - the answer to the question of how to depict the various flying techniques used over the years - finally came!! : Muybridge's study of motion!
2/19 Putting it to Work:
i had Olga shoot 3 series of me "flying" and here is one of them - dropped into the grid:
2/20 Version 2:
As the dreaming advanced the technique became more fluid.
2/21 The Physical Substrate
I'm starting to feel strung out and stringy from too many nights until 2am and not enough sleep (or sleep punctuated by frequent wake-ups as some other detail of one piece or another gets crunched and processed (last night it had to do with the method of display text for the disease/Dirty piece. And from falling down the stairs last Tuesday - everything feels out of whack. So I ran down to Amsterdamse Bos today...and back. 7 miles or so. It hurt. It felt great.
2/22 The Tornado Scene
Here's the composite landscape.
2/24 Dirty
2/23 All Over the City
A trip to Java Island to a place that Elisa Keir or Dave McManus would have felt at home in what with the special effects materials - fake foam, fake blood, rubber, rubber moulds - all about; then over to Westerpark to return the casting resin (the heat will crack the glass...better to use either transparent rubber or epoxy. A customer tries out the goods. The place kind of has the feel of The Art Coop (Champaign, IL).
2/24 Dirty
After tossing all 24 syringes onto the curved glass bowl they're soon to be embedded in and unthinkingly moving them about i become disturbed by the possibility of a cap of one of them coming off and pricking my finger. How do i know they haven't been used? What if they were used by an IV drug user, somebody with diseases? What if they are dirty?
2/25 Un-Dirty
2/25 Un-Dirty
Prepping the syringes for their immersion experience.
2/26 The Announcement
Finally...
Instructions; pull gently downward on the two silver weights to lift the blue panel and lower the green «tornado dream» panel into view
2/27 Components
The guy at Glashandel Actief - a family operation - says the glass-with-drilled-holes will be ready at 1. It ends up being 1 - the next day. Gradually I adjust expectations. Today - the 6th trip there - was only 5 hours after the 5th trip: he'd cut the oval mirror in record time.
2/28 "It's just Photoshopped"
It's certainly the practice of lucid dreaming that made it possible to take the wildly exciting and unexpected first flying dream back into waking then to begin to channel and shape it through the 30 years that have followed. Aside from the sheer delight of the experience itself is its evolution: early attempts at flight were rudimentary at best - awkward, almost embarrassing - as I flapped and floundered, feeling
ponderous and weighted down. One of the stages incorporated running with longer-and-ridiculously-longer leaping strides until a feeling of giddy weightlessness would take over then I would fall forward and - with more expertise - use minimal flapping to gain height and soar. Early on I would steer away from crowds - still feeling kind of embarrassed by the whole thing - but then came to love watching the faces of kids especially, though I have yet to be joined in flight. I came to like soaring above/through trees and, later, through open windows into cavernous interiors or buildings under construction. Now the flying still takes place horizontally with slight fingertip movements to steer, just wanting to move and it happens with arms stretched. Wondering where this leads to next - flying while sleeping on the airplane? Leaving Earth orbit? Flying without clothing? (the feeling is clothing - if at all - is minimal (as shown here, see Figs. 1-3) Instructions; pull gently downward on the two silver weights to lift the blue panel and lower the green «tornado dream» panel into view
Background fontography for "Flying in Dreams"
3/1 The Flipside
A composite of all the images used for Figure 1 and Figure 2. Just fucking disturbing, if you ask me - and I know the person well.
3/2 A Finished Piece: "Flying in Dreams"
100-or-so hours later...
The moving parts were a little bit of a nightmare
3/3 Detail from "Dirty"
3/4 Triptic
Left: Holy parts not yet together
Middle: running self-portrait
Right: A marionette sits in a last rites box next to Drowning In A Sea of Bliss (possible 7th piece)
3/5 Writer/Muse
3/6 Concept for Holy
3/6 Polder (Mentality)
A polder is a low-lying tract of land enclosed by embankments (barriers) known as dikes that forms an artificial hydrological entity, meaning it has no connection with outside water other than through manually operated devices.
Like Dirty, Drowning in a Sea of Melancholy and Holy both will use a transparent rubber/epoxy for creating a matrix in which to embed objects, text, images and artifacts but - unlike them - they won't be filled completely. So today - drawing on 3 years of living below sea level - I built 2 dikes to restrain the rubbery sea: for the former piece there will end up being 2 polders allowing a clear view to the medical illustrations at the bottom; for the latter a dyke was built to separate upper (where the bereft, childless couple's torsos are visible) from lower (where their bodies are submerged in water).
3/7 Let's keep the church out of this
This piece is taking a look at the gradations of images between medical illustration, on one end, pornography on the other and various shades of eroticism in between. Originally the idea incorporated "sacred" vs "profane" (see the sketch from 3/6), with pornography (in this instance) meant to show the sacred (pleasure) and religious imagery (in this instance) meant to show the profane (punishment, self loathing of the body)...
Until Sezneva stepped in with "That's kind of 80's," and even though I'm really grouchy today from too many nights until 4 or 5am, I realized she had a point. When we sat on the canal yesterday evening near Vondelpark something far more interesting came out of my red-wined mouth: what if the pornography occupies the perimeter and you move into the center through eroticism (vintage porn, historical porn, erotic photos, advertisements, drawings) until you wind up at medical art in the center...but the vertical sides of the shaft leading down to the medical images get plastered with hardcore porn (so you see a gradation....kind of confusing in its transitions from one thing to another...on the horizontal plane, but a sharp contrast in the vertical. Ha!
3/8 This Is Not An Ad For Gamma, Hema or Blokker
With their bar codes still visible from their base, the two ceramic bathroom vase cooling towers rise from a sea of molten epoxy and fuck-with-your-definitions images. The vaseline they were coated with doesn't seemed to have acted effectively as a bonding prophylactic - i.e. prying them loose after the epoxy cures just may not be a possibility. But that can be worked with: if I chisel/drill out the ends with the barcodes, what remains is a deep chasm which (as suggested above) suggests an optical device - e.g. binoculars, microscope or viewer into a peep show. And that's dead-on since what you'll see at the base is two erotically-charged medical illustrations done for CV Mosby circa 1992. Are they pornographic? Erotic? Educational? "What about the nearby photo of the woman having an orgasm? What? Wait...that's a Bernini Statue?! Fuck off! Really? That's not ejaculate on her face but an artifact from the 'Got Milk?' campaign? Hmmm..."
3/9 "Henry Eats a Mouse" (not to be confused with "Henry Munches a Bird")
The act of watching a cat seeming to perversely toy with the mouse - 1/100th its size - it's preparing to eat is perverse (not the act of eating, not the toying about - though it does hit nerves because of its anthropomorphic semblance via the joy the cat seems to take in the slow killing of its prey like...like...trickle down economics and what not).
It's like porn - via the extremism - and not - because of the way the cat and mouse seemed to be engaged in a lovers' dialogue, kind of gazing at each other intently, one gazing attentively as the other languishes looking to the side a little nervously, flashing out with a limb to indicate the overwhelming desire, the almost-loving touch as the mouse gets under the paw yet again, the even more loving CRUNCH as the cat religiously delivers the coup de grace, the mouse looking so Jesus-like with its front paws and tail hanging in a vertical at either side of the cat's grinding jaws.
Tonight I'm trying to figure out how to merge these two into the Melancholy piece:
The bones and the Schinkelgracht child are both about to be cast permanently into the murky blue lower half.
3/10 You Tell Me
Melancholy in construction.
L-R: Spray foam scrapings and towel M-L: embedded objects in see-through rubber w black plastic trashbag (for spillage) M-R: the dike (cardboard w spray foam support (being scraped away)) R: foam reside and single-edge razor w curved glass...this will foram the "above water" part of the image field.
3/11 30 minutes later:
3/12 6 pieces
L-R:
Flying in Dreams: (not shown, it's behind my frumpy head)
Hometown: doctored postcard from Paris, IL accompanied by almost-invisible ink printing of the poem "Hometown" around the postcard
The Drowning: bones, baby portrait in clear rubber matrix (lower half) and distraught parents above w/ curved glass cover
Pathological Procrastination Syndrome: unfinished. images, objects and artifacts set into a printer's compartmentalized box w/ epoxy and lacquer fill
Dirty: 24 syringes containing either blood, magenta ink, black ink or interferon accompanied by a poem cut into 24 strips, all set into a clear rubber matrix, with mirror (strewn w/ profanity) behind
Vagina Penis Cock Cunt: 60 images ranging from medical illustration to erotic line drawings to hentai erotic/porn to fashion advertising to hardcore porn set into 3 layers of transparent epoxy, with 2 black rectangular ceramic solids with medical illustrations at the peak
3/13 The title fits
Packing for the trip. Laundry. Groceries. Email. Construction cleanup. Packaging the 5 finished pieces. Checking baggage requirements. Wondering how Olga and Leon (contractor) are dealing with my request to have the apartment alone all day and evening. Corralling monkeys. Eating. Running 10km. All this (I think...wait...yeah) began to explain the challenge of finishing the sixth piece: Pathological Procrastination Syndrome
3/14 Taken Down At The Knees
Yesterday was a lost cause. with the increasing sense of haven been beaten to a pulp in the ring with Ali. This was nothing compared to what befell the beautiful tall bird-laden tree outside the window, shielding us from much of the courtyard yet keeping enough revealed to have a magical mix of seclusion and Rear Window. now it's all rear window. I rose back up and am storming through the final 48 hours.
3/15 In the wings, in the gallery
Finally finally finally PPS is sort of half-finished. But now back up to Java Island to get another batch of epoxy...and because curing time is 48 hours, then I've decided I'll finish this piece in Paris in the gallery during the days when I'm there watching the place.
3/16 J'arrive
All the artwork survived the trip and is in the gallery. Today we hang the show.
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.
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.
3/3 Detail from "Dirty"
3/4 Triptic
Left: Holy parts not yet together
Middle: running self-portrait
Right: A marionette sits in a last rites box next to Drowning In A Sea of Bliss (possible 7th piece)
3/5 Writer/Muse
Olga finished final revisions on her 5th article today. We're on fire.
A visit to the 17th c cemetery behind the house on the Schinkel Gracht. This lost child's image that will be used within the water in Drowning in a Sea of Melacholy, explaining it.
Henry Buttons Big Game Cat. Outside. Spring.
3/6 Concept for Holy
3/6 Polder (Mentality)
A polder is a low-lying tract of land enclosed by embankments (barriers) known as dikes that forms an artificial hydrological entity, meaning it has no connection with outside water other than through manually operated devices.
Like Dirty, Drowning in a Sea of Melancholy and Holy both will use a transparent rubber/epoxy for creating a matrix in which to embed objects, text, images and artifacts but - unlike them - they won't be filled completely. So today - drawing on 3 years of living below sea level - I built 2 dikes to restrain the rubbery sea: for the former piece there will end up being 2 polders allowing a clear view to the medical illustrations at the bottom; for the latter a dyke was built to separate upper (where the bereft, childless couple's torsos are visible) from lower (where their bodies are submerged in water).
3/7 Let's keep the church out of this
This piece is taking a look at the gradations of images between medical illustration, on one end, pornography on the other and various shades of eroticism in between. Originally the idea incorporated "sacred" vs "profane" (see the sketch from 3/6), with pornography (in this instance) meant to show the sacred (pleasure) and religious imagery (in this instance) meant to show the profane (punishment, self loathing of the body)...
Until Sezneva stepped in with "That's kind of 80's," and even though I'm really grouchy today from too many nights until 4 or 5am, I realized she had a point. When we sat on the canal yesterday evening near Vondelpark something far more interesting came out of my red-wined mouth: what if the pornography occupies the perimeter and you move into the center through eroticism (vintage porn, historical porn, erotic photos, advertisements, drawings) until you wind up at medical art in the center...but the vertical sides of the shaft leading down to the medical images get plastered with hardcore porn (so you see a gradation....kind of confusing in its transitions from one thing to another...on the horizontal plane, but a sharp contrast in the vertical. Ha!
3/8 This Is Not An Ad For Gamma, Hema or Blokker
With their bar codes still visible from their base, the two ceramic bathroom vase cooling towers rise from a sea of molten epoxy and fuck-with-your-definitions images. The vaseline they were coated with doesn't seemed to have acted effectively as a bonding prophylactic - i.e. prying them loose after the epoxy cures just may not be a possibility. But that can be worked with: if I chisel/drill out the ends with the barcodes, what remains is a deep chasm which (as suggested above) suggests an optical device - e.g. binoculars, microscope or viewer into a peep show. And that's dead-on since what you'll see at the base is two erotically-charged medical illustrations done for CV Mosby circa 1992. Are they pornographic? Erotic? Educational? "What about the nearby photo of the woman having an orgasm? What? Wait...that's a Bernini Statue?! Fuck off! Really? That's not ejaculate on her face but an artifact from the 'Got Milk?' campaign? Hmmm..."
3/9 "Henry Eats a Mouse" (not to be confused with "Henry Munches a Bird")
The act of watching a cat seeming to perversely toy with the mouse - 1/100th its size - it's preparing to eat is perverse (not the act of eating, not the toying about - though it does hit nerves because of its anthropomorphic semblance via the joy the cat seems to take in the slow killing of its prey like...like...trickle down economics and what not).
It's like porn - via the extremism - and not - because of the way the cat and mouse seemed to be engaged in a lovers' dialogue, kind of gazing at each other intently, one gazing attentively as the other languishes looking to the side a little nervously, flashing out with a limb to indicate the overwhelming desire, the almost-loving touch as the mouse gets under the paw yet again, the even more loving CRUNCH as the cat religiously delivers the coup de grace, the mouse looking so Jesus-like with its front paws and tail hanging in a vertical at either side of the cat's grinding jaws.
Tonight I'm trying to figure out how to merge these two into the Melancholy piece:
The bones and the Schinkelgracht child are both about to be cast permanently into the murky blue lower half.
3/10 You Tell Me
Melancholy in construction.
L-R: Spray foam scrapings and towel M-L: embedded objects in see-through rubber w black plastic trashbag (for spillage) M-R: the dike (cardboard w spray foam support (being scraped away)) R: foam reside and single-edge razor w curved glass...this will foram the "above water" part of the image field.
3/11 30 minutes later:
3/12 6 pieces
L-R:
Flying in Dreams: (not shown, it's behind my frumpy head)
Hometown: doctored postcard from Paris, IL accompanied by almost-invisible ink printing of the poem "Hometown" around the postcard
The Drowning: bones, baby portrait in clear rubber matrix (lower half) and distraught parents above w/ curved glass cover
Pathological Procrastination Syndrome: unfinished. images, objects and artifacts set into a printer's compartmentalized box w/ epoxy and lacquer fill
Dirty: 24 syringes containing either blood, magenta ink, black ink or interferon accompanied by a poem cut into 24 strips, all set into a clear rubber matrix, with mirror (strewn w/ profanity) behind
Vagina Penis Cock Cunt: 60 images ranging from medical illustration to erotic line drawings to hentai erotic/porn to fashion advertising to hardcore porn set into 3 layers of transparent epoxy, with 2 black rectangular ceramic solids with medical illustrations at the peak
3/13 The title fits
Packing for the trip. Laundry. Groceries. Email. Construction cleanup. Packaging the 5 finished pieces. Checking baggage requirements. Wondering how Olga and Leon (contractor) are dealing with my request to have the apartment alone all day and evening. Corralling monkeys. Eating. Running 10km. All this (I think...wait...yeah) began to explain the challenge of finishing the sixth piece: Pathological Procrastination Syndrome
3/14 Taken Down At The Knees
Yesterday was a lost cause. with the increasing sense of haven been beaten to a pulp in the ring with Ali. This was nothing compared to what befell the beautiful tall bird-laden tree outside the window, shielding us from much of the courtyard yet keeping enough revealed to have a magical mix of seclusion and Rear Window. now it's all rear window. I rose back up and am storming through the final 48 hours.
3/15 In the wings, in the gallery
Finally finally finally PPS is sort of half-finished. But now back up to Java Island to get another batch of epoxy...and because curing time is 48 hours, then I've decided I'll finish this piece in Paris in the gallery during the days when I'm there watching the place.
3/16 J'arrive
All the artwork survived the trip and is in the gallery. Today we hang the show.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment