In my studio mining forty years of unfinished work and collected materials, I’ve set out to re-purpose the sluggish build-up.
I have categorized piles. One is a stack of old found notes and drawings transferred to soft metal. Some of these are drawings by the disenfranchised people I work with in my socially engaged practice, some are domestic, didactic signs and directions found in the abandoned buildings or given to me.
A decade ago, a biology professor friend, Frank Jazsh, after cleaning out his office, left eight boxes of approximately two thousand out-of-print educational transparencies on the floor outside my office. Two months later after retiring from teaching, he died of a heart attack while fishing his favorite trout stream in Yellow Stone.
I keep those transparencies close by on a table where I fiddle with my stacks and piles. Gradually I began intuitively layering the transparencies over the old metal notes creating a sort of investigation of those slippages and entanglements of language and visual experience through which we try to locate meaning. These layered worlds seem to explore the dualities and fluidity of identity, dislocation, and border crossings: substance/ absence, matter/spirit, microscopic/cosmic, poverty/privilege .
The search here is for some unspoken connection in these random collisions.
For me they embody the peculiar, ridiculous, and meaningful (less) qualities of most things human