2019

Plaster, clay, soil, paper pulp, wood, cyanotype

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial

Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues

You can tell by the way she smiles. 

-Bob Dylan

It’s been pointed out to me that a startling majority of this show and indeed, my broader arts career, has been comprised of fragments. As I’ve reflected on this, wondering what it might suggest, I’ve found myself meditating on a few basic elements of my process and the resulting product. Poet Ander Monson writes: “Any fragment is an art, an artifact. Is an echo of the whole. Is an echo; is the whole.” I believe this show may speak to the mind’s desire to create contexts for the jarring occurrences and discoveries in our lives. We draw connections and tell ourselves stories. In fragments we see wholes. In these moments of others’ bodies, divorced from their personhood, we see ourselves, our own bodies. Perhaps this is a byproduct of our self soothing mechanisms in a world so full of disturbance. Perhaps it is a celebration of the complexity of the human brain.

I also see this show as a testament and continuation of the perpetual human struggle to freeze the unfreezable, to stop time for a while. I believe that our relationship with our own mortality, be it full blown denial or the embrace of an inevitable friend, determines much of how we move through the world. Even with a healthy acknowledgement of our own end, humans have strived for millenia to preserve, document, remember, and understand the excruciatingly ephemeral elements of our own humanity.  We enshrine fragments and evidence of those who have gone before- hoping those who come after may do the same- that the mundane evidence of our lives may be transformed into exemplary humanity. I am fascinated by the longing to grasp the fleeting softness of our bodies and lives within the unforgiving entropy of time and space. It seems at once futile and hauntingly hopeful.

I suppose it is also true that I deal in fragments because my clay and plaster are fragile, and my hands are simply too clumsy to reify poetry without breaking a few things.