Statement
Hey there old friend, my blood,
I wonder if other girls think of you the same way that I do.
Red gold rubbed between fingertips becomes velvet feeling. I think of 1970’s Hammer films – thick like corn starch – dark cherry cola with maraschino brightness leaks onto Ingrid Pitts’ amazing breasts.
I often touch you to make sure that you are there.
I think of Dario Argento’s women being pierced and punctured – the texture and color of Benjamin Moore’s “Warm Comfort 2010-20” or “Tomato Red 2010-10” slides in piles across patterned curtains, vaulted ceilings, broken windows, faux marble floor.
I picture myself – an awkward 4th to Dracula’s three brides. We walk slowly in succession through the graveyard filled with fog and howling, clinging to our hearts and abdomens. A dramatic tribe. We cradle the spaces around our bodies that have been concurrently full and empty time and again, hunched over with the posture of want and longing, and also Endometriosis.
“The Body as Tomb or the Omnipotent Devouring.” A title line from Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun bears remembering.
The maternal body nurtures, but it also consumes.
And of course there were those times where you did carry other life. You were with me then as you are with me now, distributing hot wet oxygen, despite our mutual betrayals.
We pour ourselves into another vessel.
There cast feelings become velvet paintings, camp eulogies, love letters to the barren in still bloom.
On Other Recent Works:
My recent collages and sculptures are inspired by revelatory moments when the imaginary-visual and the material-haptic bump up against each other, instances when you perceive yourself as both connected to and removed from your own sense of corporeal being.
In this work I often consider cloth and skin as metonymic. To me, cloth signifies notions of birth, death, rebirth, and experiences of life in between. Humans are born naked but are wrapped in cloth upon entering the social world, after exiting their mother’s bodies. Dead bodies are ritualistically wrapped in cloth during mourning ceremonies and in preservation rites such as mummification. The same stock of satin fabric could be used to sew a wedding dress, a christening gown, or the lining of a casket. Cloth can be used to swaddle or suffocate, constrain or comfort, celebrate or shame. I like the feelings and ideas that are sparked by these dichotomies.
Aspects of my process can be looked at much like a combination of stream of consciousness and constrained writing techniques. I find, produce, and manipulate source materials as I go, working within a fixed set of thematic constraints. These methods allow for an automatic processing of visual and visceral information on a semiotic level, an intuitive sense of sight that is both linked to and detached from our contemporary media experience.
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