statement

Spin the bottle: a kissing game.  But also, a situation in which an everyday object is set in motion, resulting in an intimate (but fleeting) relationship.

My work is concerned with the ways in which familiar objects can be transformed, effaced, or dematerialized through motion and light.  One group of sculptures explores how objects can literally perform for a viewer, and what the duration of this experience can mean.  Everyday objects act as stand-ins or take on roles in a sculptural domestic drama.  Kinetic mechanisms serve to narrate a relationship in which human gesture and mechanical repetition coexist in an uneasy balance.

Other work explores notions of transparency, reflection, and ephemerality.  A mirror can turn light against itself, becoming an object, a shadow, and a reflection all at once.  Moving mirrors and spinning silhouettes defamiliarize what are normally the everyday objects of material culture. A flat shape can appear as a volume, if it spins fast enough.  I am interested in that transformation, and in what your eye sees when it knows it’s being fooled.  These sculptures are paradoxical objects that move to become still, that are traces of themselves, always leaving and never gone.

Certain forms of theater – Japanese puppetry, mime, and improvisation, for example – do not require us to suspend our disbelief and accept what we see as a window into a separate reality.  Rather, they reveal how the performance is created as it unfolds.  We can see the puppeteer in black, we can see that there is no glass in the mime’s hand, but despite these rifts in the illusion the drama still resonates.  In fact, the drama resonates that much deeper in its transcendence of the rifts that are left exposed.  Moments are created in which seeing and knowing are both at odds and in concert.

I look to situate the art experience where seeing and knowing come together at a sharp edge.  The experience of the work balances on that edge.