Artist Statement which includes the Modern Man series and Graffiti Series

We are bombarded with advertisements on billboards, cars, television, and even in the sky. News, e-mail, weather updates, images of war, social networking pages, and stories of loss, hunger, and natural and man-made disasters are delivered to our computers and phones night and day; their arrivals are announced with a beep or chime. Stories of hoarding and addictions—to food, spending, sex, money, and even other people—frighten and fascinate us. But because we are unable to take in the whole picture at once, we are forced to view the world in fragments, creating a sense of disarray and heightened anxiety and confusion.

The nature of chaos inspires my work. Collage provides a means to reflect and express the tension between our fragmented struggle for understanding and simultaneously articulate the beauty that can emerge from disorder. My work challenges the existing structures we use to cope with disarray, and suggests that, through a studied and coherent reassembling of fragments, we can gain a more diverse and integrated view of the world and ourselves.

Seven Questions Series

We are bombarded with advertisements on billboards, cars, television, and in the sky. News, e-mail, weather updates, images of war, social networking pages, and stories of loss, hunger, and natural and man-made disasters are delivered to our computers and phones night and day.  These are the external things, the information, data, and titillating images that impinge on our senses, demanding our attention in a hundred different ways.

And we are bombarded from within as well, by our own unremitting thought cycles: a constant loop of hopes and fears, dreams and worries, a relentless anxiety against the specter of which we yearn to predict and control the future. It is this very angst which further impacts the quality and future of our relationships, our health, the health of those we care about, and our dreams of accomplishment and success, as we find ourselves toiling, as hero or villain of the stories we tell ourselves, in the shadow of our mortality.

These are the hundred storms that batter us internally and externally, creating chaos and a heightened sense of disarray that cannot be tamed as long as we refuse to examine all of the  fragments.

What, exactly, are these fragments? How can we engage in a dialogue with chaos that advances, rather than alienates us, from the interior and exterior events that invade and infuse our lives?

Using photographic collage, the images in the “Seven Questions” exhibition are a dialogue with the theoretical questions postulated by Jungian and Gestalt philosophy, whose purpose it is to make conscious the shadowy underworld of the chaotic unconscious—questions which are, by their very nature, an acknowledgement of the healing potential of this chaos. Collage acts as visual representation of the tension that arises in the fragmented, questioning self, as we parse the line between chaos as conveyer of great pain, and chaos as harbinger of great revelation. The end result, for questioner and viewer alike, is an overarching beauty that both embodies, and transcends, the sum of its parts.

(The questions, designed to initiate a conversation between yourself and a dream figure or various aspects of yourself are: Who are you and what are you?  What is my life purpose?  What do you like about yourself or what you do? What do you dislike about yourself or what you do? What is your greatest fear? What is your greatest desire or what do you want more than anything else? What is your gift to the world? )

Series 3 

There is always a psychological aspect to all that we are drawn to create.  The beauty, power, familiarity and yet simplicity of these symbols have called to artists for generations and still do.

In series 3 I expanded my process by using new elements and new images. To the familiar process, described below, I added photos that I had taken of vintage maps and ephemera found in antique stores, weathered paper, paint and graffiti.  The new images were dresses and shoes from store windows in Chicago, a coin operated child’s ride found the the Badlands of South Dakota, a Cow sign on a farm in Georgia and a horse on my neighbor’s property, just to name a few.

In creating my icon collages, I use images of signs, posters, and graffiti found in the numerous photographs I have taken. I experiment with many combinations, sometimes rejecting an entire image or using it as part of another collage. As few as three or as many as ten photographs might be used to compose one image, or small pieces of one photograph might be used multiple times. It is through this process that I marry my love of photography with other art forms, transforming photographic images into something complex, richly textured, and painterly.

Special Series:

After hearing an NPR story about the thousands who are expecting the end of the world this Saturday at 6 PM(May 21st, 2011), I stumbled upon an article in the Wall Street Journal titled ”The Enduring Appeal of the Apocalypse by Michael Shermer.  ” In most doomsday scenarios, the end is a transition to a new beginning and a better life.”  The title alone was one of the most inspiring commentaries I have read in a while. I was compelled to do a piece to commemorate it.

Western Series 

The cowboy has been portrayed in American culture as a masculine ideal and a symbol of individualism for decades. John Wayne, the Marlboro Man and Clint Eastwood embodied and helped to solidify the cowboy-as-rugged-individualist icon. Like many men of his generation, my father fully internalized the cowboy image. He lived in south Texas during his early adulthood, at which time he became a literal manifestation of it, trading regular shoes for cowboy boots, and a cap for a cowboy hat.  Later, because he wanted a cowboy son to complete the picture, he dressed me in full cowboy regalia. But my preferences leaned toward painting pictures more than riding horses, and, to my father’s disappointment, my cowboy childhood came to an end fairly early. For years, I would try to distance myself not only from all things cowboy, but from all things southern and country; in short, I rejected that which most clearly defined my father, and that which my father so heartily embraced. But the unconscious has a sense of humor, unexpectedly slipping that which we thought we’d cast off back into the spotlight of our psyche when we aren’t looking. Knowing this, it should not have surprised me when I started to create my western series. And yet it did. The series began when I found a 1906 stereograph cowboy image while on my travels through Omaha. Back home in my studio, I enjoyed retrofitting the cowboy in (very un-cowboylike) clothes and colors, until he emerged as something more interesting, quirky and colorful than his iconic self had been. I was hooked. I began looking for other vintage western images to recreate, and before long I had a reworked pop-art bull rider, which I created using cut up articles from Art News and Art Forum, a cowboy wearing Prada sunglasses, and my “Wu Wei” cowboy, a riff on the Asian concept of “flow.” But the series raised some serious questions for me. How was it that our culture’s metaphorical cowboy, and the attendant notion of the independent, self-made individualist who needs no one, wound up creating cracks in the very culture it purported to strengthen? While the cowboy (i.e. ideal man) as self-sufficient individualist is an appealing idea, it is one that inevitably causes more anxiety than comfort, more feelings of isolation than community, more puzzlement and feelings of failure when we are forced to admit—as we always are—that we need other people to survive. And another question: how can I pay homage to American culture, and my personal history, while simultaneously attempting to demystify it? Perhaps the answer lies in recognizing and honoring the cowboy mythology as a part of history whose contribution has been both heroic and tragic. Perhaps it is to see history’s true rugged individualists exactly as they were: not as heroes or mythological figures, but as fallible human beings capable of mistakes and as dependent on one another as we are today. Perhaps if we as a society were to reclaim the “real west” of today—that is, a world that is ethnically diverse, dependent on one another, and very much human, we could, in the process, reclaim the part of ourselves that feels the isolation and pain or those long-ago internalized myths, and set the record straight. It is always tempting to me, in examining both the personal and the universal influences on my work, to bring my ideas to resolution. If I resist this urge, however, what I come to is something more global and at the same time hopefully more personal to others: the recognition that our images of the west have much to tell us about how we live—but only if we will see them as symbols of our culture’s projections, rather than as a literal group of people whose lifestyle we shallowly long to embrace.

Landscape Series 

I walk in fields in my mind. Years ago I realized that I was doing this mainly during conversations. I’m not dissociative; to the contrary, often I imagine I am walking with the person I’m talking to. The fields are near my hometown in west Tennessee. Interestingly, while I’ve driven past them many times, I’ve never actually walked in them.

 I believe that we make art as a result of a psychological call or need. Since I have most often found inspiration in the color, movement and energy of urban environments, I was initially surprised by my own move in the direction of landscapes. I soon realized, however, that whether I was taking in the vastness of the Great Plains, the majesty of the Rockies, or the simple beauty of the hills and gorges of the Southeast, landscapes provided a template onto which I both projected, and had reflected back to me, my thoughts and emotions. Storms, depending upon my mood, could be dark and threatening or a peaceful isolated shower. A path through a forest could be lonely or lovely.

It’s my goal, in creating landscape images, to provide the viewer with a template onto which thoughts, feelings, and emotions might be projected–to provide a field, so to speak, that invites a larger conversation

Guitar Series 

I have been drawn to many iconic images including guitars, pianos, rockets, and bicycles. The guitar, however, stands alone. From the iconic scene of Tom Cruise playing air guitar in Risky Business, to the reverence we have for legends Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Robert Johnson (who sold his soul to the devil to master this instrument), the guitar has found its way into the contemporary American psyche. It is a repository for childhood dreams, nurturing our fantasy of power through fame, and seducing us in our early attempts to master that which does not lend itself easily to mastery.

In creating my guitar collages, I use images of signs, posters, and graffiti found in the numerous photographs I have taken. I experiment with many combinations, sometimes rejecting an entire image or using it as part of another collage. As few as three or as many as ten photographs might be used to compose one image, or small pieces of one photograph might be used multiple times. It is through this process that I marry my love of photography with other art forms, transforming photographic images into something complex, richly textured, and painterly