Artist’s Statement

I have yet to recover the statement from this exhibit. However, I can summarize the motivation behind the production of this work. In retrospect, there seem to be three major factors that contributed to my work in this vein.

Frankly speaking, this work was in part inspired by a desire to simplify the process of making work presentable for exhibition. I have always done my own framing and had grown tired of the monumental effort required to mat and frame my work before a show. I began toying with the idea of painting on ready-made “display armatures” (as began calling them).

This impetus provided me with an opportunity to utilize skills developed over a number of undergraduate sculpture classes. The time seemed ripe to look for a way to combine painting with 3-D form.

In addition, I have always been something of a pack rat. I would find myself dragging worn tools or machinery back to my studio, first seeing it as potential still life material. Initially, it was not very difficult to find adequate pairings that made sense. The first piece I worked on was a discarded computer tower. I saw the computer as nothing more than a high-end tool. As with any tool, it is used by humans to expedite a task.   After dissembling the tower’s plastic covering, I noted its superstructure could easily be rigged to “frame” a number of paintings, in particular if they were to be executed on 1/8’ thick panels. After consideration, I determined to match images in a way that would hint at the notion of tool evolution. For example, on one side of the tower, an ergonomically designed hammer was paired with a big rock; on the opposite side, a precision caliper was teamed with a length of sisal twine, knotted at regular intervals. This piece, eventually titled “Tool (Evolution) Box”, also included on its front and back, a number of paintings installed therein, that hinted at the dangers a computer might pose if used improperly (just as can happen with any tool).  

Without further explanation, suffice it to say that this experience led to an intense burst of creative energy that often produced large display armatures for rather small paintings. Ironically, this frequently wound up making the framing process much more laborious (even if more interesting) than traditional framing could ever have been.  For instance, for the piece called, “A Victim of his Own Success,” I wound up hand-carving traditional frames to look like French-fries stacked end to end, as a part of the linkage by which the painting panels were suspended within the “found” frames that inspired the piece (a pair of discarded, commercial deep-fry baskets).

Some of these pieces eventually came to rely on motion as a part of their design. I often used “lazy Susan” hardware to allow for them to be spun around, inviting viewers to experience them in the round by turning them on the hardware’s pivot.

There are also a number of paintings that ultimately employed traditional frames but that were, in a sense, still “constructed.” These paintings were designed to combine images that were painted on separate canvases. The separate paintings were conjoined to create provocative, though admittedly cryptic scenarios.  Once or twice, I actually painted false seams in works. The hope was that the seams (actual or implied) would help the viewer to pause a bit to consider their strategic placement or even their very reason for their being. All of this done with the aim of somehow shepherding the viewer to a deeper consideration of the work, perhaps allowing for the ultimate discovery of a larger, overarching message that might lie within.  If this sounds a bit convoluted, looking back, it certainly was. As most artists do, I was searching for a form that suited my artistic and intellectual needs. Heck, at that time I was also looking to discover what those needs actually were. But for whatever flaws exist in it as a whole, this work has proven vitally important to my development as an artist. In a sense, this experimentation ultimately led to what I consider the highly successful work done in the Syntactic Structures exhibit in 2011. Despite any inconsistencies in the general body of work, I still find that some individual pieces have held up quite well over time.

Interestingly, the final pieces completed for this show were a few small, traditionally framed pieces (including, “Bucket Pin" and “Cracked Light Fixture”). These works presaged work that would be done 4 years later, work that would be key to the development of the form that has dominated my work for the past dozen years.

*Please note that as of the time of this publication, the images here represent an incomplete version of this exhibition. I will continue to add more images as I digitize them from their current analog form.