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from Shrines and Altars 2008
The piece "Corruption" is an attempt to create an expressive jolt using a complex set of layered imagery that gives the viewer a world to explore. The styrofoam head, the picture, the box of machine parts, the "masonic eye" made of a fragment of wood, the formal drapery, the snake eating its tail, and the ubiquitous "home depot" tarp are all confounding together in a surreal mix of old and new.
This series Shrines and Altars began with a need to make a statement regarding the Iraq War using photographs I made as a freshman in college in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Seeing the remarkable parallels with the Vietnam debacle, I felt it imperative to look back and bring these images forward. In this process, I began to use still life arrangement as a means of working with these memories and current impressions. In addition, having recently emptied out my mother’s storage unit after her death, I found all sorts of interesting objects that would bring another personal and evocative layer into the work. I also realized that machine parts I had saved years ago, that had been used to build whimsical robots by a good friend who passed away at an early age, would add another contrasting personal layer. Finally, I have also used ubiquitous items referencing our contemporary “Home Depot” - “Best Buy” culture.
Shrines, we know, are arrangements of symbolic objects allowing us to honor the departed and altars are platforms for rituals often associated with hopes and dreams. I use these timeless pathways to provoke a range of emotions and states of mind that I hope find some universality in their final form. Through many variations, I began to move beyond the images of Nixon and Bobby Kennedy to a more interior space. Thus, these shrine and altar-like arrangements of mirrors, tarps, frames, postcards, glass fragments, machine parts, Sunday ads and other objects became a universe of their own, a kind of “wunderkammer” as it was called in 17th century Germany, or “wonder closet” of collected curiosities. As time has progressed, the series has evolved into a theater for my imagination, the infinity inside held within physical and psychological frames. The process of making these works and the transformative result is alchemy. Starting simply, I arrange objects and images in an increasingly complex structure, sometimes in gravity defying balance. Choosing and placing is an intuitive, spontaneous dance. A motley crew of elem
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