...PRACTICE... | ARTIST STATEMENT

Three approaches to a fundamental concept:

• – Devotion to an endeavor. Manifested as images from the climbers’ cemetery in Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn, images of dust and sand whose form is stolen from pictures I love or react to, i.e. Vija Celmins or Thomas Struth. Portraits of houseplants made with a cell phone camera, and in the case of Cherifa Tree whose form is stolen from Brice Marden and whose content is stolen from the tree through which Jane Bowles’ lover, Cherifa, controlled her.
• – Interiors that explore objects as containers of meaning, the meaning we place in them, and the extent to which all man-made objects are an act of communication.
• – Devotional offerings...the daily practice. Here is to all the unprovable truths, bravely fueled solely by belief.

“Art is the highest form of hope.”

–Gerhard Richter, 

“She wanted to control the household though the plant. The plant was her proxy or stooge. And she could give it orders before she left and see that they were carried out during the night. She really believed in these things.”
–Paul Bowles on Cherifa, the Moroccan woman with whom Jane Bowles fell in love and who many think was responsible for her demise.

“Use never does anything but shelter meaning.”
–Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower

“The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is not a particularly beautiful sentence, but the idea of American beauty could not exist without the cool impudence of its first seven words: We hold these truths to be self-evident. In a single breath, this phrase exempts the sentence’s subsequent asseverations of human equality and unalienable rights from the claims of traditional conduct, religious belief, metaphysical certainty, and scientific proof. The words do what the thirteen colonies were themselves doing. The declare their independence and divest themselves of all external authority.”
–Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon