Totems for a Flattened Now
2016
Exhibited at:
CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY, January 2016
The past is ever present and the ghost of the future lurks within it. Totems for a Flattened Now juxtaposes sculptures of antiquity in their contemporary contexts, still lifes created in my studio using a variety of second hand materials and found photographs, and digitally manipulated or constructed images. They explore the ways by which images, myths, and symbols are recycled, transformed, and re-represented according to our culture’s ever changing needs and desires. Placed into a system of modular frames which can be altered and reconfigured at will, the pieces exist in a permanent state of material and semantic incompleteness, constantly hovering between photography and sculpture, image and object. Together they mine the histories of art and mark making to express my own ambivalence toward the contemporary condition of images, concepts, and perceptions in this new world in which the real and the virtual so often overlap and history seems little more than a flickering hallucination.