The Phrase

i was parts of me, before i became me, a triad in turn

with the companion experience to keep us as i passed through with her  
89 X 67 in

(detail)

with our elbows up to keep from going under we move through the river of time  
108 X 84in

towards integrity, towards a foundation causing ripples of interaction  
216 X 96 in

(foundation detail)

within the entrance of the public sphere
54X 54 in

(public sphere detail)

(public sphere detail)

where dreams of unrealistic support  
96X48in

(unrealistic support detail)

found us in a hall of passageways asking how we got in and how we are going to get out 95 X 53in

(question detail)

text on the gallery wall

Each line within this phrase corresponds to a large scale collage. They hold the location and concern for the actions I take, what is done in my name and question how can I identify systemic causes of racism, sexism and environmental degradation. I desired a record of how I can be mindful to avoid embodying and propagating the harmful ideals I see orchestrated within institutional legislation. I often find these evils thriving inside me. I expel them onto scraps of paper so I can look them in the eye, unfold their seams and see where they have been to try and rid myself of them.

My hope is that these cyclical, self-referential works have created a space to digest ideas by inviting others to ride the ebb and flow of my words and visuals. The prose poetry is my reading, my journey through the works I have created. Through my struggle to accompany this group of images with words, I encourage viewers to participate, to form their own narrative while meditating on the ideas I have worked inside the images.

The scale of the mark itself testifies to my swirling body and dancing arms. A mark of how I have learned to move for months. I have come to a way of creating images where my process remains evident in a physical form. This record of my actions and thoughts proves useful; what I have learned cannot be summarized yet exists in a form that can be shared.

These visuals are dependent upon layering. Layering enables thoughts, events and conclusions made at different times from different locations to come together and share multiple perspectives on the subject matter at hand. Collage is the process, the vocabulary that allows me to articulate this eternally layered, infinitely changing understanding of autonomy.

With others present; we can jump into what is seen. What is seen is personal and must be approached respectfully as such. With that in mind I will stand with what I have done. I am a conversationalist. I strive to let my tongue be held, flap free and twist to control my pace when necessary. To consistently learn from speaking/listening and all other social interaction which involve as much if not more effort then the creation one of these large collages. Each is a unique form of conversation where different ingredients come together in an attempt to form an integrity that can be understood as communication.

Through the creation and destruction of a variety of print processes reborn as larger scale collages, I encourage you to enter a surreal world infused with my personal experience and political commentary. These collages could be constructed using multiple versions of one image. Through a variety of assemblage techniques the original image could have completely dissipated. It leaves no recognizable part of itself, only a story informed by what they are composed of.

I print mostly on recycled paper; over old drawings, etchings or found fabric. The more history is embedded within the materiality of image, the easier it is for me to work with it. The habit of collecting in public invites a break in the secrecy surrounding art making. The question “What are you doing?” might be the beginning of an alliance. In an attempt to bring the artist labor out of the night and back to the work force I have traced my figuration, my topography, my map taking the form of this visual phrase.

revised artist statement

I was parts of we. Before I became me. A triad in turn

With a companion experience to keep us as I passed through with her

I move through a river of time. With elbows up to keep from going under

I swim towards integrity, a foundation causing ripples of interaction

all the way to the entrance of the public sphere

Where dreams of unrealistic support

Found us in a hall of passageways asking how we got in and how we are going to get out.

Each of the lines above is an excerpt from a set of phrases that corresponds to a large scale collage. They hold the location and concern for the actions I take, what is done in my name and question how can I identify systemic causes of racism, sexism and environmental degradation. Understanding orchestrations within institutional legislation is useful but to see a change on a day-to-day basis I desired a record of how I can be mindful to avoid embodying and propagating these harmful ideals. I often find these evils thriving inside me. I expel them onto scraps of paper so I can look them in the eye, unfold their seams to see where they have been and try to rid myself of them.

My hope is that these cyclical, self-referential works have the ability to create a space to digest ideas by inviting others to ride the ebb and flow of my words and visuals. The prose poetry is my reading, my journey through the works I have created. Through my struggle to accompany this group of images with words, I hope to encourage viewers to form their own narrative while meditating on the ideas I have collaged visually. The scale of the mark itself testifies to my swirling body and dancing arms. A mark of how I have moved for months. I have come to a way of creating images where my process remains evident in a physical form. This record of my actions and thoughts proves useful; what I have learned cannot be summarized yet exists in a form that can be shared.

These visuals are dependent upon layering. Layering enables thoughts, events and conclusions made at different times from different locations to come together, each sharing a slightly varied perspective on the subject matter. Collage is the process, the vocabulary that allows me to articulate my eternally layered, infinitely changing understanding of autonomy. With others present; we can jump into what is seen. What is seen is personal and must be approached respectfully as such. With that in mind I will stand with what I have done. I am a conversationalist. I strive to let my tongue be held, flap free and twist to control my pace when necessary. To learn consistently from speaking/listening and all other social interaction involves as much effort as creating one of these large collages. Each is a unique form of conversation where different ingredients come together in an attempt to form an integrity that can be understood as communication. Through the creation and destruction of a variety of print processes reborn as larger scale collages, I encourage you to enter a surreal world infused with my personal experience and political commentary. These collages could be constructed with versions of one image that through a variety of assemblage techniques create a story infused with the subject matter of the original clippings. I print mostly on recycled paper; over old drawings, etchings or found paper/fabric. The more history is embedded within the materiality of image, the easier it is for me to work with it. The habit of collecting enables a break in the secrecy surrounding art making. The question “What are you doing?” might be the beginning of an alliance. In an attempt to bring the artist labor out of the night and back to the work force I have traced my figuration, my topography, my map, that takes the form of this visual phrase.

what do you do?

I am a collector. My collections become collages. College is a codified story through combinations of clippings. Each clipping has its respective history of where I have been and what I was thinking when I recognized them as valuable. Collage is a way to create a personal logic that I can reference and share even during my most contradictory states. I am a printmaker due to my graphic style, love of reproduction and identification with the radical history of resistance within the medium. Etching copper and zinc, carving wood, and screen-printing come together when I digest my proofs into large-scale narrative collage murals. Each clipping/print functions in its own right. Each is a problem to be solved when layered upon or ripped apart. GSS would fulfill the dire need to continue working in all my desired mediums while being introduced to a community of visual arts lovers in my hometown.

my figuration, my topography. My map takes the form of the phrase:

I was parts of we. Before I became me. A triad in turn

had the companion experience to keep us as I passed through with her

while we move through a river of time. With elbows up to keep from going under

we swim towards an integrity, a foundation causing ripples of interaction

All the way to the entrance of the public sphere

Where dreams of unrealistic support

Found us in a hall of passageways asking how we got in and how we are going to get out.

question

I am privileged to have the space to write what I like

I am thankful to have been able to read what I want,

In this case the words of female theorists gone fiction gave me poetry where I can laugh out loud at the phrases and how true they ring.

Yet taken out of their context, out of the safety of their homes

In the minds of the writer/ reader or the reader on the verge of writing they must wait.
With their feet arched, heels off the floor in the pose of a sprinter they linger.

They listen for the time I can enter them seamlessly into our conversation.

A conversation articulated in talk that will let them float on the weight of their truth.
Float on until these seedlings are grounded with ink on paper or skin, sprouting onto mind or praxis.

Its not just what was said but how and when it was delivered that make truth tangible

My question relates to how can I give, pass on, provide for you the space I have experienced.
or if it is possible

I have felt what it is for the workings of my mind to be valued

I have felt this and given in to its luxury by supporting and challenging to my benefit

at times detriment.  

I want to give this space to you. If you want it too.

I have tired to create this visually and will continue to do so for I still have unpacking to do.
What I articulate is still in the process of clarifying itself.

If I make this space will you be able to come there?

Once we get there will it be a parcel, beneficial to take with us on our separate ways?

The Ingredients

The breath Drawing

A map of lungs on top of a figure with directional lines that lead out and back into the center pillar of the page. A image prompted by my observation of two physically conscious elders attempting to control their breath and heart rate.
A praxis with the desired results being a physical and mental digestion, discipline and relaxation it was intriguing for me to watch them delve into this mental state in my presence without introduction or warning.
to let another person watch you while you are moving with your eyes closed takes a great deal of trust. A trust in your self to be able to find a place of comfort while under the light of my gaze
a trust in me that I will not act in any way that is harmful or otherwise communicable through your observation in sight.

Through my wonderment I often followed suit. Sat, smiling from ear to ear bringing my attention to my breath. Letting my stomach drop as I filled my lungs with air. Attention to what I am filling up with and how I feel as the air stretches me up, out, down again.
Giving me more time, one minute how many breaths.
In and out.
Face flush with consciousness and calm again.
Breath.
In and out.

The image conceived became a reminder to be conscious of what is coming in
going out of my body my mind.

Through my eyes and out my mouth

I made this sign to remember I have a wide range of control I may exercise over this process.

As pulsing infinity these two orifice pathways filled with infinite possibility.
What is/has/will come out/go inside?

Right now air

Right now light

Right now fills each up with what is/has/will be

Right now the only color I can see is purple pulses

within these passageways are my martyrs

I love my country to which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history who have fought the government to make right.

To all the sons and daughters.

Our fore mothers and fore fathers came singing through slaughter

through hell and high water so I could stand here

breathless at the sight

How a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light.

My ancestors

My martyrs

those I came from past my parents

The images of ancestors 

I have are constructed using regurgitated stories, media and me

So I made her
this blood, dusk colored ancestor who travels the path protected by her own martyrs.
She is as much i part of me and i choose to see in she

Those surrounding her are not those who spawned her but those she choose to remember.

Considered rats with wings

these pigeons were dead before she became acquainted with them

Fused to the pavement of New York City streets each died frozen in a position of flight

they never realized in their lives.

Their memories do not sadden me.

I believe their suffering is over and am grateful for their contribution in their guidance to where I am

I see vaguely the pathways they chose to walk and their lives inform mine

these passages are the foundation for a receding wall where a dissecting silhouette sits reseeding

This structure has an entrance.

The archway.

As of now there is no light passing through this archway as it in fact casts a shadow.

My mother who is no longer my physical home or primary source of nourishment is much too large to travel inside though she stands at the entrance as witness

Picking the skin on her fingers- A nervous habit of self mutilation I proudly acquired and then resented

I was confused to why my dearest mother Mary stood naked outside the gate before she faded into the ground that would hold my feet

Oh my mama! She gave me these feathered breaths! Oh my mama! She gave me these fancy feet I’m walking on.

CONTRONTING THE MATERNAL- JULIA KRISTEVA

BUT DEVOTEES OF THE ABJECT, SHE AS WELL AS HE, do not cease looking within what flows from the other’s “innermost being,” for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous , fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body. For, in the misfire of identification with the mother as well as with the father, how else are they to be maintained in the Other?

How, if not by incorporating a devouring mother,

for want of having been able to introject her and joy in what manifests her,

for want of being avoke to signify her; Urine, blood, sperm and excrement. Harebrained staging of an abortion, of self-giving birth ever miscarried,

endlessly to be renewed,

the hope for rebirth is short-circuited by the very splitting: The advent of one’s own identity demands a law that mutilated,

whereas jouissance demands an abjection from which identity becomes absent.

(54, Powers of horror)

Jouissance being…

The pleasure principle according  to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering (Ethics).- Wiki 3/30/11

One possible account for the absolute pain that my mothers care evolved into

during the years 2001-2005

Food Loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the yes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of the milk-harmless, thin as sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring- I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forhead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not want to assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since food is not an ‘other’ for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself, within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself.  (3, Powers of Horror)

Food Loathing was dear to me though not a seed I had to swallow and hold so deep in the pit of my stomach for I had the forces to expel. I hid my vomit in my hands, massaging it down the drain in the tub sink present in the classroom. I was ashamed of what was clearly internal in color and texture.

Ashamed only until a friend took interest and wanted to see or a parent needed a demonstration of why I would not bite into the side of juicy tomato or partake in the tip of a banana.

I refused the medication

It would not work

I did not want it to work for the messages that streamed from my stomach told me how, what and when.   

 Information I believed would not harm me.

Now I have learned

Though often I do not abide and call the stinging scold to hit my teeth

Demanding chew again

still I consider the above lessons valuable and I hand pick what I want to feed others and myself

EARTHSEEDS- BE WARY OF WHAT WE FEED EACH OTHER; is there a connectivity to be found in agreeing upon constant change?

How about in admittance of desire
I desire change the way I desire my lover

I desire hypothetical companionship constantly

I desire people because I see their change in me

in the light of their eyes touching corners and crevices in need of a good sweep
illuminated! and given a once over
and over
a dusting
swept into the air
useful to make tangible

When this light becomes touchable

In the dusk

In the twilight

The skittish light shows me what I am looking for

It is I that fills in where the light does not

I recognize my direction during my deviation and change to what I see

for I desire to sow seeds I wish to watch grow.

To see grown to a practice

of how I treat other and myself.

A never-ending trial with myself as residing judge reflected in every surface.

The reflection articulating itself as an indefinable pattern.

This patterned reflection grows in every direction if attempts are made to draw, graph, explain from the center, side or otherwise it infinitely expands and complicates,

It cannot be pinned down or made still

But it is clearly on everything

A sameness that is both uniform and appropriate to each local in matter, form and pigment

Yet it is own separate entity

Where observable outside forces effect it as a whole

Comparable to watching the wind pass through a field of grass

Where each blade is effected differently

 animated in motion near others who have been so too

To the point where I can watch the air travel in front of/through/past me

A visual affirmation of the experience

If feeling it wasn't enough

THE EPIC ARROW ON THE POST OFFICE WALL

The iconic imagery of fetuses life cycle supported by youthful conceptions of reproduction

Long before I began to menstruate I was riding high on a wave of my public self

based on uninformed conceptions of pollination

at eight years of age I digested and parceled out what I knew of my sexuality in my sleep.

Where a florescent scene illuminated the nibbling of corn on the cob genitals

So close I could hear the crunch

I sat on the #1 local across from my rearing on a diet of street walking, train riding and science fiction

mama showing the way

on the foundation of my unnamed ancestors
she illustrates the possible pathways that are open to me

State(me) Ment(?)

I wish to speak of the history of my image making as ongoing attempt to de/re construct my understanding of my self and my existence within the

Global

Political

Social

context

The impulse to make images first appeared as I became involved

Actively

Physically

Sexually

Emotionally

With two individuals

Before this time, at this time, our involvement was what affirmed/destroyed my life.

Our involvement cleared the brush so that I now I could see an entrance to a particular space in my mind. Linked to a space in my physical,

in my hands that I had no experience knowing what to do with. So I wrote small. Small lines. Small letters making up misspelled words, often in the wrong order and backwards I expressed in secret what I wished to ask the public.

Questioning; my growth and expansion

Confusion

Separation

Anger

Knowing the ebb and flow in masturbation, simultaneous love and hatred of self-flagellation, digestive and reproductive contraction.

I explored without them without restraint on paper

behind the closed door of the bathroom

I hid in order to avoid the inquisitive gaze of my mother, my partner until that time when I left her. “I need to be alone. I need to not talk to you. Just for a year or two” so that I may find my own understanding outside of your mouth that  disgustingly glitters with your ever-present reasoning. You had to find yours as well as I did mine)

Between the covers of a notebook

at the river

On the concrete

In patches of city grass

I attempted to flesh out an understanding of who this youth was and what she was like

All in a rush

To find an answer I needed more

MORE interactions to see my reactions to derive MORE analysis to have MORE conclusions.

It was of use

The more I did,

I Saw

I spoke

I Replay every night in my head behind my eyes

with commentary and pangs of irrepressible guilt, shame, regret and acceptance always with the intention of doing better later)

I am of buildings and bridges
I am made to bend in the wind
to withstand the world,
that's what it takes

She sang

“all that steel and stone is no match for the air, my friend for what doesn't bend breaks”

I’ve sung for years and still finding more of to what I am saying

I am

A (wo)man made form

Forms made by us that need other us’s to find what they made

So I found voices in philosophy texts with words that describe the streets and avenues for how contradiction navigates itself into our minds

It begins with a disconnect

Disconnection between knowledge

A unknown part of history

Using a dictionary for a language i don’t know

There were pages missing from the book

The reality that I hold more memory then I can account for given the events I can recall. I hold this memory within me and I desire to know the logic.

The logic that is presented, that dominates, that is coersive, that is a means for the ends of control. The control of my body. Control through capital. I can know this logic

What is more challenging is the desire to know the trajectory

The overlapping intertwined lines running parallel, perpendicular and at every degree and angle, gripping one another’s curves.

how it has happened

How I have happened

It is not written but it can be spoken

For speech and sight can shift and change and those changes can speak and see too.

Although I have just learned to touch my toes I have always had this flexibility

Elasticity

An ability to adapt

To be a chameleon

Not to blend but to assume a recognizable form in order to avoid confusion in conversation

To a fault according to some (myself included)

A close friend of mine was skeptical of my enthusiasm to ride different rhythms of conversations with a multiplicity of New Yorkers. Sketchy. Flakey. False. Were the characteristics she attributed to me, retracting them later in a letter. Stating that after three years of a college education she now recognized an attempt to communicate utilizing different cultural codes.

I still have this

The desire to seek the edges of how I am

For now I have come to a clearing and it is clear I have patterns.

One repetition is the impulse to please. Not a man, not one in particular although there is one in particular. Not my man, as if I could possess another person through a consensual relationship and if this happened, as if this happening would allow me to shed my penis shaped lenses.

(which by the way I was not born with but took years to procure through practice and encouragement. The hours of television, radio and uninvited cat calls and petting zooes on the street began at age 13 until the present that reminded. I should be flattered that people want to fuck me.

The comment “your beautiful” was a dotted color line where I would use my agency to say through clenched teeth “thank you” while I cursed them with my eyes, screaming “you can only say that because your not afraid I‘ll take it as an invitation to rape you motherfucker”)

Once these glasses have been put on and fastened with my granny strap I wait until I see the fog so I may take them off my face allowing the lenses to hang around my neck.

I make an effort to communicate with myself about what I feel and what I want because I don’t always have the desire to please but I often do so anyway.

This is something I learned. A practice we taught each other.

I cannot perpetually be a mirror. I can help show you how you are but I will not let you forget I am here as I do this. If you do not wish to see me as you seek yourself I will leave. I will steal the object you have made of me and hustle it out there as I strive to buy back my soul.  

I do however have the desire to establish a sisterhood

among the women.

Bonds that are not based on a depiction of ourselves as gossiping, competitive, hateful people, a picture of perfection that was forced down our throats as I was busy memorizing every word of every song on Alanis Morrissette “jagged little pill” and watching reruns of sex in the city.

I desire a community where exploring communication is primary. Where we seek out each others opinions to challenge them

with the intention of watching the seeds we planted in each other grow.

I want to continuously build a space where personal experience can be used to understand larger political dynamics

one that considers Bell Hooks observation that victimization used as rallying point for organizing community perpetuates distress and produces a shaky foundation.

I desire an environment where interest in others is from the impulse to teach and learn. Where we can check and challenge each other with premature judgment.  

I understand the threat of the medical institution, their ability to deprive me of being born in a place my mother feels safe.

I desire the choice to give birth when and where I want to, with or without drugs If I want to.

Where I will not fear persecution for miscarrying a fetus when my mother has had four.

I desire a world where I can state fuck H.R. 3, H.R. 358, H.R. 217 and those who it effects will know I am talking about a war

A war on the working class, a war on women

We need to know BEFORE the are passed into law. So we can fight them together.

I desire to live this way be able to come and go

To take lessons learned inside of myself popping this bubble where ever I am to bring my inside, outside to table to share with my family.

un-realist ick support

4ft X 8ft collage

 I make to mark

To stand as witness to the births and deaths
witness of those who pass without monuments.

I grieve to give
giving value to what has gone

Forming a headstone of what was once whole

The whole of mother and child

The service of their titles dependent on the existence of the other

one

I make to know

I know I have mourned the loss of my childhood

A passage I killed with self imposed responsibility of care
carefulness needed for the illict and explict

It is through no letting go that our hands have scabbed over

The fear of in grown nails has been banished from your nightmares

as the in from one has become out grown in the other

These nerves ceased to make my knees shake as it moves free form on its own accord satisfyingly snapping the layer of ice

penetrating parts I never cared to know the name of

We grew together

I Made me be

you

An articulation of a need

to leave

to be free

to be rid of her

in order to see me

I did not speak of this decision

That I would be partnered to perch

in the corner of a tree that was named after a mind where a bug eyed man-child knew the weather ahead of time

For now I can see

looking through from where I now was and had wanted to be

to a scene where I cannot find the parts of two that made us three

Influences; Composite, Digital Imaging and Silk Screen

I am primarily a collage artist. I enjoy the challenge of integrating collected clippings from my life and seamlessly integrating them into a world filled with surreal humanoid landscapes of my design. With the immense amount of paper product the printmaking process produces I have been able to rely on my own clippings rather then my collecting habit. My working is completely autobiographical. The subject matter may not always be a conscious decision I recognize before the creation of an image but it is rare that I do not gain personal insight from further analysis afterwards. Although I see myself throughout all of my work I do not wish to shut down alternative pathways for other interpretations for my expression is the response to living within a web of dynamics which effect all of us collectively and individually. I believe that utilizing materials collected from my life allows me to draw connections between the memory of an event (as solidified in the clippings) and larger dynamics I read from their combination with more ambiguous images.

My androgynous characters reappear consistently throughout the body of my work in different arrangements, sometimes recognizably the same person, often mistaken as distant cousins. I have listed some of my artistic influences for these artists are those whose lives and voices are carried through a compilation of images from their daily lives and imaginations. The people and things that they see are depicted throughout their work and serve as a jumping off point from which these artists are able to depart from and let their impulses guide the development of the image.

The Lithographs by Kathe Kollwitz (1867) titled “The Call of Death” “Death Seizes a Woman”, “Death Swoops” and “Death and a Woman” if read in the context of a body of her work are all clearly informed by her sketches from life. They partly may have been scenes she observed or perhaps created by referencing previous sketches yet there is a clear point of departure where her imagination becomes necessary. This necessary point of departure is the subject of Death. Death being an event that often has different feelings of relief, surprise, fear or anguish, Death is a happening Kollwitz found necessary to anthropomorphize, to make a present being in her work. These depictions of death may be more true to the experience of the loss of life then a rendering of a dyeing person or a dead body. I sought out these particular prints of Kollwitz is because I believe it is necessary to talk about the end of our lives as it is an event that happens to all of us. I do not wish to ignore or demonize or ignore the end of my life when I do not know how it will happen and what effect it will leave. Furthermore, death is often the result of bad health due to hierarchal organization. The information concerning the causes and effects of death are mostly concentrated in the hands of our health care providers, doctors, the medical industry and governments who, though they possess such knowledge still avoid the topic and have difficultly discussing death with those who will experience it. The duty of making the topic of death understandable is left to our artists, those who make horror films filled with young women ravaged unexpectedly and the recorded history of genocides where the power relations and banality of evil becomes clear but no singular voices are heard. Kathe Kollwitz is another source of information on the topic as I hope to be.

Ralph Steadman (b. 1936) work is a valuable documentation of his life and the events he has experienced. The disruptions within his illustrations often look as though they were made after the arrangement of a collage while his titles, phrases and handwriting are a inseparable part of his pieces. There is a consistency in all of his work written, photographic and illustrated that I can personally relate to for the vast majority of what I have created I can see a trademark style that could only be my work. Through this silk-screening course I would like to put this belief to the test and see if my signature taste and style will extend into digital work that has less of my physical hand.

            Kiki Smith (B. 1954 Germany) has created a body of work that function as a dictionary of contemporary iconic imagery. Utilizing combinations of print media and direct hand work her imagery addresses the life cycle of a woman whose contemplation of her origin, her end, and her body have encouraged me to approach these topics with calmness and understanding. Kiki Smith work explores our human life cycle, anatomy, birth and death while effortlessly crossing borders between artistic processes, she has helped pave the way for the sculptural collage illustrative language i am trying to achieve.

Ariel Pinks (b. 1978) is a combination of observed and abstracted images, many times bodies, many times himself makes it easy for me to enjoy the brutal, grotesque honesty of his work. With bodies and parts that come in and out of one another it is hard to distinguish a birth from a death scene as they often happen simultaneously. The photographic texture he achieves with graphite brings realism to his exaggerations that can be achieve through a digital combination of hand and photographic imagery.  Pinks humor is clear in the lack of reluctance to pin down the meaning of the image with phrases such as “old fart booty time” and “fool for love”. These images can be found on the web at  http://www.angelfire.com/la3/zanna/art.html where he facetiously states that all prints can be bought for 10,000$. It is for his honesty, the interest in orifices,  the combination of the real and fantastic and his willingness to share his personal experiences with others that I list him as an influence.

Feminine Relief

The imagery I produce addresses my experience as a female-bodied individual. The expression of my life realized in woodcut prints span the entirety of my imagined human life cycle from birth to death. There are times i must have other eyes to guide me to the wells of the waters of my mind. 

Currently I have been meditating on how we as a society and I as an individual understand and act in the event of birth and death. Our being born from another, from a female is primary for all. I know my existence is a product of another human, myself constructed in relation to my mother. She began to think of me and how she would be once i was here. If I had not arrived she would have still been momma to my sister. I did come though. Once i arrived it would be a few more years until i had enough practice to store memory of my own. Too busy trying to sit up and focus my eyes.
In this way the formulation of myself began before I physically arrived in the world and I believe will continue after I leave in the form of memory.

            Through the creation of woodcuts and the process of tearing apart and piecing them back together as larger scale collages I will encourage viewers to enter to a surreal world infused with personal experience and political commentary. These collages could entirely made up of proofs of one image that through a variety of assemblages create an environment infused with the subject matter of that one original image. I have been printing with mostly black and white on recycled paper. By recycled I mean that I am printing over old drawings, etchings or found pieces of paper. For I find that the more history I associate with the image the easier it is for me to utilize.  Many of my subjects appear in multiple pieces, reincarnated with different stories yet all related within the same general subject matter. I am challenged by my desire to simultaneously highlight the consistency of my subjects without giving the impression that I am trying to convey a distinct narrative of events. 

Theories below are the first authors I have encountered that are able to articulate the multiplicity that exists in a single person that I try to convey in my visual work.  Death is the end of our consciousness. This understanding is key to having an idea of an individual definition of myself. If I am sure to end then I can be sure of the existence of my beginning, middle and the reality of the present. Jean Paul Sartre and Helen Cixous’s fiction writing demonstrates the importance of life in the context of death. I find her metaphors that speak simultaneously about birth and death through personal experience useful to my individual pursuit of grasping my life cycle. Cixous concept of “the Third body” is the birth of another consciousness that springs forth from the dynamic of those who were once two separate existences. This ever-changing combination of two that makes a third is not an additional entity or something outside of oneself but what I become when I am interacting with another. The Third body is what I know as the birth of a dynamic between any two people where by being in proximity to another we adapt and slightly change. This Third collects and dissipates, is born and dies with the coming together and separating of any combination of people. I found this Third to be incredibly useful concept for understanding specific experiences and larger social political dynamics. These Third bodies are exponentially distorted due to the systematic separations we embody and proliferate. The knowledge of ourselves as the present state of a trajectory self (lineage) through a larger history informs and helps to sustain a complex web of social dynamics. The present past and future selves are not fully understood and are at odds with the pervasive ideology that dictates concepts of defined selves based on shallow social arc-types. Instead of building on shaky foundations I must try to clear the fog so I may live in and act upon the grievances I see that inhibit me from understanding others and myself.

In a hall of passage ways asking how they got in and how they are going to get out
4ft X 8ft Collage

4ftX4ft collage

I have

placed myself and I choose to stay

to see

what we make of each other

with my right foot up

Contractions. Pulsing. You feel that?

Its I. I feel that

Tighten

Release

I am not sure what that is

I’ve been told

Of my insides working

And I would like to hear them again

She waits for the wholeness of family to appear out of the shadows that keep for company.

I sleep without light
Without my eyes darting through makeshift threats
lucid dreaming through near escapes each night
Without you
Without fear

My evil voice of inner monologue

Judging others and myself

That’s my mirror, my reflection in the warped image of fluorescent light

My stagnation 

through youth and age few are wise 

yet you once told me i was your heart 

and i 

lost in the ancient rivers of your winkled milky eyes saw this to be true

so hello and goodbye to the one hundred year old year old woman 

departing in a timely fashion

her last moments come at the anniversary of her birth 

with her dearest nearest

i wish you well