|
from Shrines and Altars 2008
"Home is Where the Heart Is" is an attempt to create a disturbing as well as a relieving image. I grew up with the small stitched framed image at the top of this piece. The contrast with the images and forms below it is extreme. The layered imagery and the contrasting top and bottom transition from disturbing to ironic. The box containing an arm sits below a postcard of the Rembrandt painting of a butchering which layers upon diaphanous layers of glass and light.
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
|
|
|
