Wednesday, February 27, 2013

updated statement

Evocations of the flesh - in material, form, and manner - signify a meeting point for dualisms of all sorts. My studio practice is rooted in the notion that a richness can be found in the blurry space between alternatives: what is there formed by what is not, and what is not there formed by what is. I like to invert and/or blur the boundaries between these two states in attempts to evoke feelings of familiar ambiguity, comfortable tension, and reluctant desire.

Skin is a barrier, a wall, denoting interior from exterior (subject from object), yet it’s full of its own physical intricacies, hollows and bumps that muddle those very distinctions. Just as the material of our bodies is made up of many layers, so too are the flesh's various associations. A subtle surreality is evoked, whereby the flesh functions simultaneously on physical, psychological, metaphorical, and metaphysical levels.

My work is influenced by an existential understanding of holes, which is rooted in an ontological (and thus pre-sexual) desire to fill voids. While the Freudian model speaks of an “original” hole that renders subsequent holes only metaphors, the existentialists suggest that, in a sense, all holes plead obscurely to be filled. They are appeals to the triumph of the full over the empty, of existence over nothingness. 

Thus the physical finds its parallel in the spiritual: the body functions as a microcosm, continually giving glimpses into the beyond. Flesh acts as a tangible metaphor - at once a barrier and a carrier of matter and meaning.

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