VIVA MESSY REALITY

Can AI replicate or imitate my work? It can certainly generate similar imagery, and if only seen on LCD smartphone or computer screens, the crucial element of the surface textures is lost. or at least severely compromised. But until they find a way to 3D print AI images using sacks of scrappy found materials, the physical works themselves are safe.

I work improvisationally. Layers accumulate, get buried, cut into, peeled away, scraped, ripped, scratched, torn and sanded; and the found papers I use are often weathered and degraded. My collages are textured with freckles, patches, scars and wrinkles that, like brushstrokes in oil painting, hold a kind of muscle memory, the DNA of a process. And like messy reality, they are full of complex sensory information. I don’t, literally or figuratively, airbrush anything. I believe whatever resonance, beauty or meaning there is in my work lies in how it holds and shares that visible accumulation of playful trial and error.

We spend so much time touching and looking at the screens on our devices (like you and I are doing now). I want my work to be alive to the rest of life; to real life, which we know is in every way messy, three-dimensional, textured, granular. 

As you may know, I've been on the move quite a bit––three different studios in the last year. and I will soon be between studios once again, but if you'd like to see some of my work not on your screen, in all its textured glory, I have some 40 pieces at home in New Hampshire, and am about to send another batch from here in Florence. I'll be back in NH from mid-June, and will be happy to arrange a viewing and show you what I am talking about!

detail, "4X" 13 1/3 x17 1/3 inches, collage on panel, 2022. ( I want to illustrate the point I made, but you see the irony. A close-up like this is the best I can do.)