Born of a preoccupation with “looking”, a subdued mania for collections, and an integral desire to arrange groups of things- I work in collage. I like the playfulness of its unassembled elements, the immediacy of its potential to create associative content, the element of chance and discovery in the process of mining thousands of images from source material. Appearing first as subtle details within principally non-representational paintings and drawings, collaged elements were once a punctuation mark in the midst of a language of oil and graphite. Steadily these punctuations multiplied and the painterly abstraction atrophied, culminating in collage emerging my primary visual language.
Currently, the work falls into two parallel bodies. First, smaller collages: eight-inch squares, works-on-paper. These provide a uniformity of scale and format for nurturing a continued distillation of formalist compositions. Second, anything larger (potentially fifteen feet in one direction): predominantly collage, often juxtaposed against color fields of various media; the provision here being an unbounded freedom of individualized response within a given piece (inclusive of the conjunctive exploration of color field painting). Both bodies are in production simultaneously, congruently. They inform one another. My approach is process-oriented; each piece’s preceding choices dictate its subsequent needs. The running thematic thread is “everything is only what is next to it”. My palette is gathered from printed media, unaltered beyond removal of its embedded periphery. Cutting and pasting, imagery is recycled, repurposed, re-contextualized. Equal time is spent collecting, selecting, eliminating, and assembling materials.
Works are conceptual, loosely allegorical vignettes that tend toward being open-ended meditations upon and conversations with the world. My intention is not to make conclusive thematic statements but to develop an expansive impression about a primarily private dialogue while simultaneously providing a significant visual basis for personal relationship within the viewer and maintaining a sense of play.
