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"Fruition," from the series Shrines and Altars 2008, is a take off from the classic still life with fruit. Indeed, the postcard of one of Cezanne's great still life painting was the point of departure for this piece. Built with layers of glass and color, a naive still life painting then my own parody with machine parts this is one of the more reserved and "classical" looking pieces from the series.
This series, Shrines and Altars 2008, began with a need to make a statement regarding the Iraq War using photographs I made as a freshman in college in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Seeing the remarkable parallels with the Vietnam debacle, it seemed imperative to look back and bring these images forward. In this process, I began to use still life arrangement as a means of working with these memories and current impressions. I also wanted to create fragments that could suggest and infer depending on how the viewer perceived the final result. Added to this, I had recently emptied out my mother’s storage unit after her death. There I found all sorts of interesting items that might bring another layer of my history into the work. This material would personalize it, making it more emotionally significant. Through many iterations, I began to move beyond the images of Nixon and Bobby Kennedy to a more interior and personally expressive space. Thus, these still life arrangements of mirror, frames, postcards, image fragments, machine parts, textures and other objects became a universe of their own; a kind of “wunderkammer” as it was called in 17th century Germany, or “wonder closet” of collected curiosities. As time progressed, the series has evolved into a magic stage. It is a theater for my imagination, the infinity inside held within physical and psychological frames. The process of making these works and the transformative result is an alchemy of sorts. Starting simply, I arrange objects and images in an increasingly complex structure, sometimes in gravity defying balance. Choosing and placing is an intuitive, spontaneous dance. The process builds and flows with ritual intensity until the light fails. Indeed, as the series has expanded, I find myself taking more and more risks in the theater, moving the high wire higher and higher in a quest to go deeper.
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