Artist's Statement
regarding general themes in my work 2003–2006
Junk elegant.
We all see what we pay attention to.
For the last few years, I've been paying attention to ugly objects and effects that rise out of economic development and aesthetic impoverishment (often one in the same). I've also been paying attention to the light and shadows that dance on and about these objects and effects.
For me, ugliness constitutes an ongoing tragedy. I am hardwired to crave the beautiful. I can always find beauty in nature, but in the cities where I live, most of the beauty was traded in a long time ago.
Where I live is rich: rich in ugly! Ugly structures, ugly materials, ugly shapes and colors, ugly juxtapositions, that on a bad day make me cry. I decided a few years back to find in this my subject matter. To root through the ugly in search of gems to shoot with my camera, to draw, to manipulate, and to meditate on.
My gems are forms that manage to ride the line of ugly and beauty: the elegant geometrics intrinsic in the tire and shopping cart, for instance, have wooed me into repeated attentions. I isolate my objects and stabilize my compositions to slow myself down to a point of meditative attention. Abstractions and shadows carry me over into a higher realm.
And that is the point. In paying attention to ugliness, I've wiggled my way through to beauty. I see it more easily now. The work will undoubtedly be changing. . .