Marks

1999

These images deal with a variety of emotional and psychological issues, including the passage of time, mortality, sex, sexual energy, vulnerability, power, the energies of being alive, the passing of those energies, the passing on of those energies. Many of these issues, considered in combination, feel incompatible to us, yet all of them co-exist simultaneously in us. How is it that we can be moving towards our death, and at the same time be so alive? How can we be so subject to the unrelenting passage of time and its effects on us, and at the same time be so ever new? How can we reconcile our power and our vulnerability?

Compositionally, the images have no clear edge, or boundary. The elements of the images spill over beyond the standard rectangle of traditional pictorial space and stray into the empty white space of the paper. Where does the image end and the non-image begin? As with the emotional and psychological issues mentioned above, how do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory concepts? In keeping with these same ideas, the compositions combine what might normally be considered unrelated types of imagery -- photographic, hand-drawn; representational, abstract; realistic, iconic. Is it possible to reconcile these into a coherent whole?

Formally, this fusion of traditionally unrelated, even antithetical, imagery into a coherent whole also raises questions about the act of image-making itself. What does it mean for an image to be "Representational"? "Abstract"? "Iconic"? "Realistic"? Or is all imagery iconic, and abstract and representational? The painting of a pipe is not a pipe. The photograph of a person is not a person. It is -- what? a collection of colors? a symbol?. Does the abstract mark, if it creates an emotional response in us, "represent" something to us? Is a black rectangular bar more iconic than a photograph of a face?

In keeping with these ideas, the images in this series make use of and reference other imagery from the history of human image-making. How are the images/icons/representations we are making today different from, or the same as, those made by our ancestors around the planet and over the ages? How do the images I create today become part of the cultural language of my successors?

Each image is printed with archival inks on archival papers in a signed limited edition of 30.