1. Barnet Newman’s stripe paintings were conceived as minimalistic representations of the omnipotent; born unto whole as viewer confronted object. A grand quest of discovering existential meaning in the sublime created a myth around the transformative power of making and seeing. The visible and invisible made whole as they confront one another and consider the possibility.
2. The photographic-image is central to my practice. As an object, a picture is a material documentation of time; a mechanical record suggesting a tangential experience of actual time. However tangible a photograph is, its material nature suggests plasticity.
3. My Catholic upbringing built a stage where fear and god were synonymous. Suggesting harmony, these stories proposed cause and effect through a weight where checks find systemic balance. This ominous wrath of the unseen became real through biblical stories of tragic proportions.
4. In an on-going series, My Father Had a Vasectomy, I remove the protagonist from family-archived photographs to disrupt. The casual nature of these snapshots is void of any significance beyond their inherent documentation. However varying their intentions might be, they possess a charm to capture revelry, making them contextually important. The significance these images hold is in their subversive nature of being insignificant, invisible, and unseen. By removing the protagonist, the images remove themselves from context and reject superficial attachments to identity and the experiential nature of memory.
5. The removal in my work situates itself as an act of manipulation to alter history, blur significance, crop perception, and frame myth. W.E.B. Du Bois uses the term of “second sight” to conceptualize the perception of identity as being both tangible and intangible. The second sight is the ability to exist in a duality of perception and misperception; an abstract space between the delineation of representation and misrepresentation. This re-contextualization of persona as white elephant addresses larger philosophical issues situated with positions of power & surveillance, the representation of identity, and the corrupt nature of memory through empathetic bias of nostalgia.
6. Situating myself as an editor, I revise found material to abstract the visual and conceptual framework of print imagery. Pictures, and their matrix, are capstones for a singular representation of collectivity. I use both open-source and archived family images to blur the distinction between collective and singular experiences.
7. The potential for crisis satisfies a need to construct physical form out of abstraction. In a post- 911 world, boundaries are a healthy form of protection and data can become loss-less under a certain set of parameters. A demarcation-alignment of identity weakens the individual core of communal strength. Barnet Newman was said to have identified with Adam, the first man. The flaw of the sublime is merely evident though hindsight with beauty being singular and truth subjective. My work is concerned with a similar intersection that exists between visual hierarchies and diverse complexities of social landscapes.