Resume

STATEMENTS

HYBRIDS: SCULPTURE-FURNITURE;

FURNITURE-SCULPTURE (RESTLESS SHELVES); FRAMING-DRAWINGS

I’m interested in the conjunction “and”. Just as conjunctions in language join separate linguistic elements within a single sentence, one of my goals is to join disparate and often opposing elements—nature to artifice, crafted objects to manufactured products, high art to low culture, art to design and craft—into hybrid objects. My work is simultaneously additive and subtractive, handmade and manufactured, in earnest and irreverent. I want to make objects that conjoin beautiful and weird and ugly things, that challenge good taste, question hierarchies, and exhibit a small history of art and culture. In essence, to make lifelike works of art. The pieces are ruminations: on the end of handwork "see Amanuensis", on comparing hand-made forms to mass-produced ones "see Restless Shelf #16", on veneer as a coating employed in both prized design objects and cheap furniture "see untitled (Atlas)". My project extends to drawings "Framing Drawings" that incorporate their frames and Restless Shelves, works which are simultaneously furniture and sculpture when activated by collaborators.

I am influenced by material culture and the decorative arts as well as the history of art. In particular, I have been inspired by how Brancusi revolutionized sculpture by employing the pedestal as another sculpture that interacts with the one it supports. In many ways his work is my point of departure as I aim to assemble unity and coherence out of dissonance.

ABOUT "RESTLESS SHELVES":

While I have exhibited my work in galleries and museums, I am often dissatisfied with the artificiality and exclusivity of those venues, wanting people to have a greater involvement with my work. In 2000, I began to make hybrid pieces that allowed for and depend upon a deeper interchange with my audience. Restless Shelves—simultaneously furniture and sculpture—are conjunctive works in which a small, carved sculpture is attached to the unusable underside of a shelf. Usually, I fabricate the shelves, but occasionally, I have purchased ready-mades from stores such as Ikea, the populist purveyor of “good” design for all. I have invited people to select a shelf, to install it at home or work, to use it, and to photograph it for me in situ.

This project is simultaneously private and interactive. It preserves my solitude and authority in the studio, and at the same time requires that I surrender my control to the collaborators who use the shelves. Each Restless Shelf functions purely as a work of art when in my studio, and is, as well, a mutable object in other environments. In the studio I indulgently cosset my ideas and carving skills into the often corporeal wooden objects that are affixed to the shelves. In my collaborators’ domains, the Restless Shelves prompt imaginations, invite play, and serve as a stage for personal collections or more pragmatic uses. When employed, they become altars and display units-- for art and sentimental mementos, and even bookshelves. This venture extends Marcel Duchamp’s observation in his essay “The Creative Act”: A work of art is completed by the viewer.

Primo Levi’s “Psychophant” is a short story about a machine that creates objects that represent the characters of those who touch it. In 1990 I read and was inspired by this work. As combining literature with visual art is yet another hybrid enterprise, it is with admiration and in the spirit of synchronicity that I join my work to his.

Drawing To Sculpture:

    I often think that I know what I am going to make--until I begin to draw. Then a greater intuition takes hold and what appears on paper is a more interesting “blueprint” for a sculpture than I had originally imagined. Without having to consider structural requirements, I can be spontaneous and speculative. I can make drawings quickly. In contrast to the actual gravity of sculpture, my drawings can be buoyant and emotional. I use drawing in order to better understand figure-ground relationships, gestures, and textures, and the interface between architectural and organic forms. I draw before, during, and after I make sculpture in order to test phenomena and to invent uncanny combinations. Mine are “working drawings”— crafted, built, and palpable. But the drawings never look like the sculptures; rather, they adumbrate the qualities that are essential to the three-dimensional works.
    An earlier series, “Drawing for a Sculpture”, generated exacting forms for future three-dimensional works. As I made these drawings and related sculptures, I began to notice the relationship of frames to drawings; in other words, how frames which are secondary to drawings, function separately as architecture but have the potential to create specific contexts. My thoughts about this have resulted in the recent “Framing Drawings”, hybrids that collapse the boundary between a drawing and its frame through interrelated carved, painted, and drawn passages. Each of these works has a counterpart in sculpture.
   My drawings and sculptures are symbiotic enterprises. Each becomes a source for the other, and each contains qualities associated with the other.