Commissions

November 10th to December 23rd, 2010

Notes for the exhibition:

Once, a long while ago, I was in a jewelry shop when I overheard a customer ask the owner, pointing to a ring in a case by the window, “Is it real?” The jeweler replied, “If you can hold it in your hand it is real.”

I make objects and installations that explore spaces that often exist beyond our perceptual abilities, spaces that exist because I dare to imagine them or have the courage to celebrate them once I have discovered them for myself. My sculptures and installations include everyday materials; however, their tension and the awkward reality they portray, stems from the source of their construction being equal parts real and imagined.

For example, on first glance a viewer might casually guess that some of my sculptures resemble specimens from the sea or images from a petri dish. Yet on close inspection, they find dingle balls from the dollar store, electrical wiring from home depot or foil from the kitchen. These materials are manipulated and juxtaposed with organic materials and traditional sculpture supplies. Seen together a new reality emerges and the sculptures suddenly sing their own shrill quirky songs.

For several years now I have been working on the Architecture of a Scent series. The twisting of space in Indian miniature painting and the compression of space in industrial schematic drawings helped spark this series of work. I began by trying to imagine what these types of spaces would look like as three-dimensional form. I wondered how I could make these forms exist in the real world, with the challenging and sobering effects of gravity, yet suggest the wonder, strangeness and weightlessness of the micro or macroscopic worlds beyond our bodies perceptual limits or the dreamscapes of our busy days and restfull nights -- places we enter only with the aid of powerful lenses or our imagination.

I wanted these sculptures to shift scale within each individual work like industrial schematic drawings, to go from the scale of our everyday world to the scale of a chemical model (This is easily done on paper but three dimensionally very difficult). During the process of building the first sculptures in the series, I observed and liked the way these forms suggested being part of a larger system. You sensed that they have some sort of purpose but you couldn’t really figure it out. They have a presence and familiarity that invokes the natural world without resorting to naturalism or realism and glories in an overt artificiality without lapsing into mere decoration.

Architecture of a Scent: Somewhere off the coast of Davenport. This work breaks new ground by grafting a different kind of space to the two primary spaces employed in the earlier works in the series. A landscape view is now combined with a specimen and chemical model view to create a more complex and challenging work. This new work at one moment suggests a shimmering cliff off the coast of Northern California blanketed in the spring with fields of tender yellow green mustard, then shifts almost instantaneously to a sparkling barnacle encrusted specimen view; then it flickers again presenting a microscopic view or an abstraction of a form illustrated via a chemical model. It becomes the building blocks of the organism itself having germinated and grown into its own ecosystem.