Fall 2013

 

I feel a great reverence for the landscape around me despite simultaneously recognizing the increasing disconnect between the land and its inhabitants. Through processes of sewing, building, writing and collecting metal, wood, words, fibers and paper, I manipulate scale, surface and materiality of commonplace objects to transform the banal into visual poems portraying the artifice and fabrication of the contemporary landscape. By elaborating on a visual and literary history of the pastoral, including twentieth century writing on the anti-pastoral and post-pastoral, these works contain both a sense of reverence for the earth as well as a sense of longing for a distant, idyllic land existent only in the form of a nostalgically fabricated memory.

 

The resulting language of these works is humorous due to an underlying melodrama and exposed artifice, but the objects are laden with an underlying sense of care and mourning. The spectrum of objects capturing my interest is vast and expansive; I am as interested in the implications and connotations of a tree-shaped air freshener or a drooping french fry as I am in a perfectly formed dollop of toothpaste or the broken grid of a misshapen chain-linked fence, and the collection of these seemingly disparate objects creates the landscape. My hope is that each fragment of these fabricated worlds becomes an animated entity possessing a history, a narrative, and a soul.