What I'm Making of my Time

There's an exhibit that I saw in NYC in May that my mind keeps coming back to revisit, Paul Chan's The 7 Lights. There was one piece that I just can't stop thinking about, it was based on a Caravaggio still life (see above). A projected video, vignetted to make it look like a film, the piece was a brightly colored crude representation of a basket of fruit. As the piece progressed, the fruit floated up, shivered and slowly separated itself from the others and floated away. I've been ruminating on it for a few months now and am getting started on a few still images of objects that are floating, based on the Paul Chan piece and my previous still lifes of market vegetables. They will eventually be large scale cyanotypes and I'm excited about the results.

In the print shop I've been experimenting with more silography (waterless litho) and combining it with sand blasted intaglios and monotype. More and more my work is evolving to include multiple methods of printing. I've been examining all of my past work and discovering an ongoing theme of isolation. I enjoy isolation and I'm trying to come up with a good way of talking about it without sounding creepy. There is a sense of fear of surrounding isolation but I find it fascinating, almost thrive on the existence of space in my life. I'm guessing that this is an inherent trait of introverts; I enjoy my alone time and can't really be happy without it. How do I articulate this without sounding...mmm...lonely. It's the balance of connection and disconnect that propels a lot of my life. My friend Kelly referred to this part of my persona as 'anthropological observer'. That I sit back and observe interactions; I pull myself out of situations, sometimes while I'm still in their midst. I can't stop my mind from working this way but understand that it very effectually separates me from others. I explore this phenomenon in my visual work.

Currently I'm making a series of prints that illustrate the separation that occurs between the tangible and virtual worlds, the mental and physical spaces. I recorded the gestures that my hand makes with the computer mouse when I'm at my day job. I then played these movements back in Illustrator creating lines for each of the gestures; a kind of automated drawing. These images are then printed over hand drawn images of bodies and hands. The last layer is a monotype that brings another element of the hand back into the piece. Automatic and intended line come together to complete the print.