2020 - No Going Back to ‘Normal’
Experience as an art director in TV has had a strong influence in my work. As common witness of what's happening in this country and the world, I see immense social change with such stresses as the COVID-19 epidemic, system-manifested racial inequality through police brutality, immigration injustice, environmental destruction etc. It's a chaos in a kind of feedback loop of fragmentation, formed from the deepening divides in politics and ideology, man versus nature, and social, economic inequality.
I've been exploring these ideas through collage, recycling a variety of discarded print media from billboard vinyl and books, to old poster bills and magazines, as well as incorporating enlarged photos. A number of learning explorations have influenced latest work, including fossil and evolutionary science, archaeology, petroglyphs and Mayan glyphs. I'm interested in how meaning is gleaned or processed from a world backdrop, more fragmented and embattled by scattered sound bites, memes, and fake news. The compact beauty of a Mayan glyph, producing a singular phrase or word from a formatted assembly of pictograms - each significantly distinct imagery of an animal, plant or phonetic - is alluring.
My work has been exploring the possibility of constructing new meaning from such an assembly of disparate parts, imagery that seems random next to each other. Latest pieces use words and phrases, not in an effort to instruct but, to be presented initially as an opportunity to deconstruct and perhaps inspire new directions of thought and meaning. The words, themselves are a kind of 'empty space', some are familiar cliches like 'believe me' or suggest other hackneyed phrases.
I'm investigating notions of archaeology in countering the additive tendency of traditional collage by a varied process of 'excavation'. Hand and machine tools are used to rip, scrape, carve into collage to reveal previous layers, sometimes giving way to interesting juxtapositions of imagery and text. It's an investigation that's added a new outlet in the evolution of latest work, as an emulation of 'glyphs'. The current work also continues a fascination with abandoned, graffitied city walls and tattered billboards, what I call urban ‘fossils’, indicative of the endless cycle of the life and death of pop trends, commerce, politics, memes and news. One example is a photo (above) taken recently in Los Angeles of a boarded-up store front on Melrose Avenue.