* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
I am examining the notion of self as an evocation of the whole of one’s history, not as one lives it in act of circumstance, but as one’s imagination creates it, in the mind and passions. Reality is not simply the world as it exists outside our minds but the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We put together parts of ourselves in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is thus to construct a world view of ourselves thru an active exercise of the imagination.
Walking the plank, buried alive or levitating, the figures in my work examine the notions of fate and inevitability. Though I mostly use images of myself, I cannot rightly say it is me. Even in video there is that level of unknowability that comes from watching yourself becoming a part of the past. The chasm of turning into history is wrought with such sadness. For within that strange wizardry there is something intolerable, foretold, lost and come to pass, some ancient magic that I cannot say. The figures seem to ask the viewer to be rescued from themselves. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Whether in drawing or video, the figure is ever changing, lending a cinematic quality that implies the passage of time. They have been here forever, exposing all that has disappeared, ghosts of the stories that might have been. This is the nature of isolation. What we can know of our own lives is in fact as limited as what we know of the world’s past. As one grows older, fragments of memory condense, like single lines of poetry, and an ever-narrowing frame of reference seeks to explain ever-widening gaps. Amputated remembrances become isolated, the rare artifacts of a life. Yet the body itself, being the first and final object, continues to radiate in the mind’s eye, like a magic lamp. In the end this work achieves what memory and the body cannot, a kind of immortality.
