Inflection Point
Return the Shadow, oil on linen, 2023; 28 x 28”
After a 20 year break from studio practice, in 2020 I made a performative lecture, four exercises in cathexis, for the Renaissance Society in Chicago, taking the new constraints of screen-based community into consideration. After years of retreating from my own making, this piece unblocked my studio libido, so to speak. Since this time, my studio research has concentrated on the void, the shadow, the ego, the individual or collective unconcious, and exploring what it means to unmake or decreate. This work began with the 2020 diary “Book of Voids” exhibited with Cauleen Smith at Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2021. Currenlty I am working with papermaking as a process of unmaking, pulping 30 years of personal records: sketchbooks, journals and daytimers and creating a new series of papers.
I am an avid lover of Jungian theory, dream analysis, psychoanalysis, color theory, archetypes, and folklore. Currently I am inspired by the work “Scores for a Black Hole” by Ander Mikalson and “Device for a Child Standing at the Mouth of a Labrynth” by Hong Hong. My favorite weekly listen is This Jungian Life podcast. The words of authors Sheila Heti (Pure Color & How Should a Person Be), Claire-Louise Bennett (The Pond), and Annie Ernaux (The Years) have been sticking to me. I’m looking at the desert transcendentalists, the group of seven, Arthur Dove and Forrest Bess as well as the ceramics and sculpture of Anna Mayer, M.C. Richards and Ruth Duckworth. As artist Mary Scott told her students (the one piece of advice or wisdom that has stayed with me since undergraduate studies): It all goes into the soup.
A little more on voids here.