In past projects I have spent time looking at Frederic Church’s: "Rainy Season in the Tropics" and J.M.W. Turner’s: "Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps." I was in search for ways to expand my language in what and how I 'view' a particular painting in its home or where it originated from. The idea being: "how does the painting change over extended viewings and how does it change when retracing its collective history?"-while both physically viewing the work and following its motions through museums, catalogues and birth. I travelled to the Royal Academy to look at the first home of J.M.W. Turner's "Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps" and travelled to Frederic Church's home, Olana, outside Hudson, NY; spending a month with the Millay Colony for the Arts following his footsteps in the Hudson Valley in search of his painting: "Twilight in The Wilderness:” a pre-civil war painting that was imagined from sketches he made throughout the area.
Current Projects:
Saving the World, 1,632 ways of Saving the World - Concerning 1,632 Chief World Systems, Attempting Abraham, and Lethe.
Saving the World and 1,632 Ways of Saving the World - Concerning 1,632 Chief World Systems:
My 1,632 project is an extension to my project: "Saving the World"-a study in a world's imagination. The project started with what is the birth of my imagination?-that of, for me, the film 'The Never Ending Story'. The concepts of belief, confidence and an imagined worlds survival contingent on a real worlds need to believe, imagine and have hope was the score for some 30 drawings that were "Saving the World" or saving my world from "the nothing:" the nothing of disbelief, irrelevance, individual being. Along with this comes the kitsch that the movie imparts in looking back on the film. The project only aims at performing the virtues entailed within the movies internal morality. An understanding of the project is the “hero” nature of youth oriented films and how this instills virtues and ethics. The individual “hero” remains in contemporary omniscience and has been part of art and society since and beyond the Greek: Ulysses. My imagination became the vehicle for playing the hero, so I and the project can manifest the morality of a contemporary world.
My extension to “Saving the World,” lye’s thus: in 1632 Galileo published his: “Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems,” which was a subversive (it was placed in the Index of Forbidden Books until 1833) unveiling of Galileo’s support of the Copernican system. The book is a Dialogue between-in short-earth being the center of the universe (Ptolemaic) and the earth and other planets orbiting the sun (Copernican). The extension to the project is 1,632 drawings on 2.5" x 3" pieces of paper with 1/2" borders. 1,632 drawings that will make up a 120" x 102" of tightly knit (all side by side) drawings that in a sense will make a sort of massive study of "1,632 ways of Saving the World~Concerning 1,632 Chief World Systems." Each individual piece will present a "finished world" (my task in each, not less the vigorous for the quantity). So the completed work: a composite of a universe, a Galilean effort of understanding a true universe; in its broader implications the work creates a state of impossibility or “something so large it is impossible to take in:” mimicking a sort of chaos not only of a said cosmos, but of our human experience today. The subversion lye’s in my idealism in each drawing regardless of the end effect; using and thinking in a similar respect to Galileos need to cover his true beliefs: I myself feel the need to cover the very nature and reason I make work: “that work should be about the transposition of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive (the cleverness and cynicism, the chaos that is ‘relevance’ in a contemporary art world and the sheer noise of our current age remain barriers to an honest approach using simple means to express).
Attempting Abraham
When I was in grade school my mom was part of a church that exorcised demons from houses. The house we lived in was possessed at this time. I was born again under a pastor’s hand in that same assembly and remember falling to the ground with his touch. I talked to my mom about how it felt to be born again, as I recall feeling energized, spiritually open. My mom was soon diagnosed with cancer. This was the beginning to years of watching cancer within my family. My sister too, was diagnosed, and a few years later my brother was told he had Crohns Disease. I myself, before I was eight, underwent numerous complications from hard child birth. I had seizures for two years and asthma kept me solitary through grade school. From this starting point, spirituality formed more than a basis for understanding afterlife, it formed a basis for survival. Faith became a practice in living as I started preaching in malls and in my school. I was saving the world, I thought, in those early years. I wanted everyone to be free in the freedom I understood then.
The lore and lessons provided respite for sorrow. The practice of reading to understand became knowledge for doubt. And so, soon, as I grew into an adult, less inclined to religion as a fundamental truth, faith became the question and so, too, god. These drawings are about investigating the distance, the distance between-as I felt keenly those early years-what is felt and what is hoped: my attempt at defining faith. The way the concept finds its way into the work is through the choice making. I have always felt a very strong parallel between the way I work and the way I live and so I treat my work as literally much the same. The encompassed whole, or the final image is a construction of many small decisions raised to a pitch that is attempting some grand motion of faith. Abraham is an impossible concept to achieve in a single image if one thinks of the implications of what the father of monotheism brought to the world: bloodshed and strife, among the obvious in our contemporary world, but there is beauty too, in its attempts at understanding the complex sense of living alone and feeling helpless to what is, what may be. The work, as an act or performance, attempts an understanding of a universal spirituality in today’s culture. Our differences expressed through violence and in the end Love, as an act of violence against one another, expresses the relevance to the task in this contemporary world. I’m attempting to understand a fundamentalism in my past and a fundamentalism that continues to proliferate all faiths in degrees that vary but yet-at their peak-become acts of segregating individuality and violence.
In many ways I am working in similar patterns to history painters, only my language is abstraction, a language I see as more fitting for the subject. I’ve always been more interested in abstraction because I believe nothing that is worth anything is concrete. Our religion and lore is much the same. The only way I can relay a very concrete sense of the way in which I aim is through literary reference and so: Milton in Paradise Lost (a blind vision of the most noble and rich abstraction: questioning interminably the lore by which life may be constructed). I am, in these drawings, Attempting Abraham by placing myself in the most ambitious seat (sure to fail) to ask the questions I’ve always asked to a distance I’ve never fully known.