Lost Time solo exhibition at Red Head Gallery
It is inescapable. As we get older the world around us is not the same world that we grew up in. We move from home to home and the people are not the same people that we have always known. People and places come and they go, they disappear or they die, and change is ever present.
All of the personal connections that we have can be seen as spaces. They form in our minds. Some of them feel like home, and some don’t.
We hold worlds in our minds and in our memories. The things that we have seen, the experiences we have had and the people that we have known make up the library of pictures in our minds. Those of us born in the last century have encountered so many images and objects actually lying around that remind us of times that have passed. We have been and still are surrounded by media and objects and environments and they are each a reflection of the time and place in which they were made and the people who made them. Those images become a language for talking about those times using pictures. We have a visual literacy that has steadily been increasing over these hundred years.
In my mixed media work I have attempted to build those spaces (people, places, memories, homes) using fragments from popular magazines. Magazines are ‘old school’ media, tangible ephemera in an age of digital mist.
An image can move us through time, the way that a smell can take you a place and time in your memory. I believe we have that same trigger with images, especially because we are such an image literate society. Maybe each fragment resonates with the time and place in which it was printed. Recomposing familiar images is how I get to what came before me – as well as how I process what is going on around me. It is also how I choose to build the future, literally.
Through magazines we can travel in our minds, but we can also travel in time. It is partly a kind of nostalgia, but in a lot of ways it is a lot more literal. It comes from a desire to physically give them a new life and to allow the printed material and the imagery of the era a chance to speak.
The remade image is frozen at a moment where everything is integrated, inside and outside, indoors and out, thought and memory spliced, as well as time and place. This is the landscape that interests me. There is a dollhouse-like quality because the painted glass frame acts as a hole in the wall, or an aperture, showing what is happening in the space on the other side. Then they are made believable, like a good story.
'Short film for a hallway' (still looking for the story), magazine paper fragments on cradled boards framed with back-painted glass, 36 pieces at 6" x 6" each
Gallery
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contained landscapes theme
''contained landscape 1', acrylic paint on cradled panels framed with back-painted glass, 5 pieces at 8" x 8" each, private collection
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'bridging winter' (diptych), acrylic paint and collage on cradled boards framed with back-painted glass (white) 2 panels at 8" x 8" each, private collection
Widescreen Images
'slip of time', magazine paper fragments on cradled board framed with back-painted glass (black), 18" x 24" private collection
The ‘widescreen’ images are architectural spaces but they are really places. All of the collage pieces come from disparate sources but the goal is to put them all together to make something that feels like a particular place and time. The black frames are reminiscent of a movie formatted for television. The screen provides a layer of distance from the image, so that you have the illusion that you are looking into them.
Space and time are inextricably woven. A two-dimensional work exists on a flat surface, but the picture plane can be manipulated in many ways. Perspective can be thought of as a set of ideas rather than a given rule. What we accept as “real” perspective is actually just one expression of it. In these pictures, altered perspective and shifts in the picture plane are constructed to show more of the picture than you would see using conventional perspective, to show a shift in time or point of view or both.
'time out of mind', magazine paper fragment on cradled board framed with back-painted glass (black), 18" x 24" private collection
'untitled', magazine paper fragment collage on cradled board framed with back-painted glass (black) private collection
Pods
'bedroom', magazine paper fragment collage on cradled board framed with back-painted glass (black), 12" x 12" private collection
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'container', magazine paper fragment with acrylic paint on cradled board, 12" x 12" private collection
Floating Architecture
This is a series that has evolved from an idea about architectural accretions in the sky or in space, an idea about what might happen if some of the space garbage orbiting the earth could coalesce and become a kind of habitation or to become intelligent and begin to organize itself.
Like the giant plastic island that has formed in the Pacific, it is as though the space garbage has come together to make something. It is possible that is has achieved consciousness and put itself together or that it has been assembled by forces and made into something that looks vaguely like a building, a space station or a condo development. It could be that these structures have been colonized, that they are sentient or that the built forms that they are made of have become something new.
Part of the project of this series is the idea of exploring what an alteration in context does to the “buildings” and alternately, what a change in building type signifies. What seems to happen in these pictures is that the architecture becomes a figure The windows give the built forms a sense of scale which allows us to have a physical relationship to them. The atmosphere around them influences how we feel about them. These are structures without gravity, subject to growth in all directions or none. Some of them have left the idea of functioning as a building entirely.
