For the past year and a half I have been engaged in an experiment wherein all the art I produce derives from images found in the Sunday Edition of The New York Times. Every piece was inspired by details taken from small, black and white photos, depicting the smoking shells of bombed buildings, the wreckage left after receding flood waters, tsunami mangled villages, car bombings, and troop movements. My media isolation experiment is intended not to glorify or monumentalize the dystopic events unfolding around us. My interest is in distilling and cataloging the patterns and forms of our daily world through an intuitive editing process. We normally see the newspaper as disposable, something to process and consume quickly. By sifting through the pictorial evidence of displacement and strife I discover what is hidden in plain view: essential visual elements that let the eye linger and keep the viewer from turning the page.
PRACTICE • PROCESS
My studio practice is built on systems of research; I scan the media-scape for cues, images or phrases that draw connections between human migration, community, mobility, transience and the over-arching politics of architecture. In making I work at the point where the autographic mark of drawing and mechanical language of print intersect. The images have a sense of magical/minimal realism that is inspired by architectural illustration, comic books, cartoon language, graffiti removal, information graphics, news footage, consumer packaging, instructional manuals and cinematic space/time.
