statement
sculpture
My work incorporates, and is prompted by, found elements. These provide a sort of social vocabulary, gleaned from material culture, that fuels meditations on consumption, language, and nature.
The simultaneous use and subversion of certain elements of "high" Modernism—geometric shape, strong color, the "purity" of abstraction—betrays my love of the source, but introduces a questioning of its premises and an investigation of its possibilities in the present day.
Other influences—cartoons, folk art, surrealism, minimalism—are evident in the work's straightforward use of materials, simplicity of form, anthropomorphism, and sense of humor.
At times, the physical resolution of my work may be quick, but the ideas behind it tend to gestate slowly. Simple items, and parts of more complex ones, are fitted together both deliberately and speculatively,
via a process of trial, error, and serendipity.
Cleaning and refinishing aside, nearly all objects
and materials are used as-is. Plaster casts are made from found molds, and any painted interventions
are minimal.
collage
These collages derive from found photos. They involve a simple manipulation: slicing out part or all of the faces or heads, then splicing the remainder of the image together.
The resulting pictures are the fruits of eliminating (or more properly, effacing) what is normally considered the most important part of a portrait. What remains is still evocative, in some measure due to the mystery of what, exactly, has been lost.