NOTES

John Cage is an important inspiration to me.  He taught me to love chaos and the randomness of life, that artists are not simply seeking to control unwieldy matter, rather seeking to wake up it the very life we are living.  Photographer Robert Adams said, “What an artist attempts to do is to make something that will convince us of life’s value.”  For me, these two points are closely related.

Continuing to explore light and materiality through layering and extraction, I’ve developed a new process motif through non-traditional application, caustic removal, and vigorously developed layers of material and gesture.  Comprised of various mixed media, silver, glass and resin, each of these new layers is radically different from the next, often producing unpredicted effects.  Inspired by the dynamic tension and flux of Philadelphia’s landscape, this investigative practice focuses on the subtle behavior of my materials and runs parallel to the scientific examination of chemical and mineral substances in order to discover both their capacities and limits—how they enhance, neutralize, conserve, or destabilize one another.

When I first began to experiment with these new techniques, I wasn’t entirely sure where this approach was coming from.  While running through my neighborhood, I began to see similarities in the urban facades of my every day routine and these new aggressive layers I was creating in my studio.  I have long been drawn to these urban walls because their embedded histories are pluralistic and abundantly apparent.  I know now that I was subconsciously creating these images, permeated by my environment which suffuses a cultural landscape.  Bringing in the silver, with its luminescence and reflective marks, I am using this process as a way of coming to terms with my own thread which runs through this tense urban fabric.

In an empty and overgrown lot there may be the imprint of a stairwell that once clung to the wall, graffiti, half-torn wheat pasted images, poorly matched rolls of paint, remnants of painters tape, or suggestive plaster, all mingled in with the decay of weather and time.  When observing the skin of this landscape, I feel as though I’m looking through a time capsule of layers which disregard one another, yet together create something new: evidence that the ground on which I stand is saturated with unnamed histories.  When I stand before these walls, I feel that “now” contains so much more than the present moment.

I love the way John Cage speaks about traffic and various ambient sounds, calling them music in the truest sense.  Similarly, when I look at these walls, I see a painting, a relief sculpture, a collaborative work.  Driven by materiality and process, I am less interested in rendering these walls, and more interested in tapping into the process by which they are made.  I want to place disregarding layers together and allow them to point to the chaos, to wake up to the very life we’re living, and make a case for its value.