Connection is fleeting. A pregnant belly distends towards a potential big bang. Macro and micro scales collide in intimate exchanges. The chaotic abyss rebounds. There are no answers but you feel infinitely generous. (all states are becoming and disintegrating)
Building on the metaphor of the ... Read more
Connection is fleeting. A pregnant belly distends towards a potential big bang. Macro and micro scales collide in intimate exchanges. The chaotic abyss rebounds. There are no answers but you feel infinitely generous. (all states are becoming and disintegrating)
Building on the metaphor of the “dome of heaven” as a visual container for what we know, this body of work consists of painted three-dimensional acrylic hemispheres ranging from bowl-sized to five feet in diameter. The dome paintings are a visual embodiment – a download of sorts – of what it feels like to be alive while in conversation with contested cosmologies. Using fabricated acrylic hemispheres that I sandblast and gesso to prepare a curved, geometric ground, silverpoint (a thin silver wire) is used to deposit silver in hatching marks on the gesso layer to create the under-drawing. The underlying forms are heightened with titanium white pigment bound in acrylic polymer to create forms that visually coalesce and simultaneously dissolve in a washed matrix of ground graphite. Fiber optics are added to create a pattern of as many as seven hundred lights programmed to flicker on the surface.
The global culture of science in the twentieth century has led me to respond to “advances” that describe our world and our place in it. Like scientists, I am interested in envisioning the governing theories of our universe although I skeptically critique claims of complete knowledge (truth) and embrace relativity and mystery. As astronomers make educated guesses about a “dark” energy, I too contemplate the fate of the universe and my own uncertainty and discontinuity. Contemplating the limitless magnitude of the universe through the lawlessness of the imagination fills my mind with, as Edmund Burke said thoughts of infinity did his, “a sort of delightful horror.”
Yielding to intuition, my newest work, “Entanglement,” uses the “heavenly canopy” of my collected, unified and illuminated world expressed on the exterior of the dome, to cradle other possibilities inside. Because of the immateriality and potential complexity of light and video, I have utilized magnifying optics to visually expand the expression of space within and reveal a video projecting inside the dome.
As a “conceptual voyager” I intuit visual solutions to problems contemplated by cosmologists, seeking to conjure a balance between expansion and collapse without asserting an absolute. As I visually play with the frothy flux created when scientists and artists imagine, each work posits, as George Johnson suggests science does, “… a glorious human construction, an artful fitting of the data into a carefully crafted mental framework, a construction of towers that just possibly might have been built another way.” As artists and scientists seek to explain our place, I join these dreamers of the “whole” to imaginatively visualize the creative matrix existing within all domes or paradigms and offer possibilities while embracing indeterminacy – where the boundary between myself and what I observe is blurred.
