Artist Statement

---

From the beginning of my career, I’ve witnessed a tectonic shift in collective consciousness from somatic experience and tactile intelligence to its unmitigated usurpation by a digital device. In response, I’ve refused to give up my commitment to slow looking. 

Initially, I was inspired by geological time, creating heavily impastoed paintings that echo seismic strata.

Shortly after I moved to New York, I witnessed 911. Ash and debris fell like the aftermath of a volcanic explosion, blanketing the streets in Lower Manhattan with urban silt. Tiny bits of street detritus and fragments mined from old machines started to creep into the layers of paint. It was then that palimpsestual text and archeology saturated my imagination.

From then on, my work contained remnants of analog engineering, partly from the visceral fact that I think they’re beautiful and partly from the conceptual observation that they share many of the primal shapes found in early forms of writing world-wide. 

I was also thinking about the Fertile Crescent, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, writing is believed to have originated and we had just started to bomb on a regular basis. The Euphrates is also the source of one of the world’s primary origin myths involving a flood. 

Then I read a tsunami survivor’s testimonial. He described a monumental wall of water that shattered everything within seconds and swept it into rapids that traveled inland for miles until it finally washed out into deposits of debris and mud. An indecipherable palimpsest of biblical proportions extended my internal visual narrative of merging the corporeal and symbolic into one breath.

The thick layers of paint started to recede, revealing the inscriptive contours that lay beneath, in the way the inlay emerged for the tsunami surviver. Over the next ten years, the topographical nature of my work, as if you were looking down on an archeological dig gave way to a nose dive into the deluge, to looking up beneath the water through a floating midden with no sense of ground.

We’re now dealing with AI which mines data much in the way archeologists dig down through strata. It’s a midden, but it’s a bot separating us further from our lived experience with no accountable connection to context or meaning.

My work has always been an incantation to a deeper pattern that we can’t fully grasp because we’re a part of it. Yet over the past four decades, as I’ve witnessed digital technology flood into every part of our lives and mental processes, my call has tones of loss. I’ve come to realize that my arc as an artist has always been about the midden, traces that we try to read to understand ourselves. And making art is my only gateway to come to terms with it.