2003-2005
I make representational works because I am fascinated by the inherent impossibility of resolution between what they are and what they signify. My relationship to nature and place is similarly complex.
Because these ideas about nature and place are immaterial they must be embodied in specifics. The familiarity of obvious archetypes—house, tree, landscape—is my starting point. I make small scale models of houses or structures I have lived in or know well. I buy model kits with predetermined architecture, choosing each for its potential to become a space. As I cut and re-glue the plastic walls and windows; my memory fails and invents. As simulation and mediation, the model embodies flaws and inconsistencies. The operation of my perception and memory is a continual memento mori. There may be a more generative site than the model, but the model is distinctively significant. Similarly, the photograph, drawing or film, is related to, but no longer dependant on, its origin. Epiphany is present to me in this uncanny place, in the shift between presence and absence.
This work is constructed to instigate an experience of looking. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space describes a psychological aspect of place and home which is related to the experience of these images. My choice of image does not function to form a chronological narrative of events. If my work is cinematic, it is in the vein of Andrei Tarkovsky—slowly, slowly, nearly plotlessly describing an internally perceived dreamlike present. If there is a narrative, it is largely a felt narrative, subjective and dependant on the experiences and desires people carry within themselves, acknowledged or not.
The drawings present realism as a system of abstract thought. The plastic trees are portraits of an “idea of tree.” The drawing technique allows the plastic of the trunk and moss of the leaves to retain their tactility. As the hours of drawing accumulate, this technique compresses time into a flat plane of observation. The process invests a worth in the tree, which is the antithesis of its origin; that is, mass-production. The drawing is aware of its objectness and existence on a flat plane but is enlivened through the process. Similarly, the architectural drawings of structures describe the topography of each surface in 3 dimensions but remain a series of lines on a page.
My short films engage the perception of time. They are simply a series of photographs. Configured in a particular manner, they cannot help but be read in terms of movement and the passing of time. A woman both moves and does not move to and from a house. Because most of the films run on a loop, time both passes and does not pass. There is a lack of resolution between each static photograph and the perception of the whole; between what they are and what they signify.
Each image announces absence, clearly referring to a physical object that is neither present nor accessible. My work scrutinizes the mechanics of perception and recollection to explore the persistence of beauty through fragmentation and find unexpected epiphany in the vernacular.