Flatfile Contemporary in Chicago was kind of great. They did one creative and inspiring thing that others galleries did not. Every few months the gallery director would call and offer a selection of thematic group shows. “Which ones do you want to do? Politics? Botanica? Paired Self Portraits?” “Yes. Yes. And Yes.” Then something wonderful […]
I was in grad school in the early 90s when distrust of beauty was at its peak. Art linked to skill or hand or pleasure was derided as superficial and manipulative. Documents of performance plinked out on a manual typewriter and mimeographed on a leaky barrel became the naked truth in art. A couple of […]
Sometimes the subject drives a body of work, sometimes the medium, sometimes technique. This time it was a tool. My friend Richard Craig makes things. This time he made a light. The lamp had a 1/8” capsule in which salts were melted to a plasma at 800 degrees Fahrenheit which kicked off 20,000 lumens. It […]
I got off a plane in Jacksonville, Florida. The air was thick with moisture. Light pines canopied ground palms in a spongy humus. I can tell this story of my home and nearby places, where sand dunes and razor grass fall into dells of mud and moss. Rowing through a bayou in North Carolina with […]
My father was an underwater archaeologist. Because of this my relationship with skeletons may be different than other people’s. When my foot falls, I know there’s someone down there. Having explored several intimate objects in shadow and the relationship between bikes and horns rendered on a wall and how they recall the thing in the […]
I just couldn’t look at another bicycle. I couldn’t draw another spoke. What now? “What now?” is what happens right after a solo exhibit. In the same way as movies and books, the making stops well before the show opens. I need at least a few months for photography, curating, framing, and transport. Then…the reception! […]
My mother retired to an apartment in Raleigh. I emptied her house. Dismantling a house is like reducing a story to its component letters or selling a Picasso brushstroke by brushstroke. Meaning and value get tossed out with the context. By the time I was done I was no longer the beloved daughter of 13 […]
Yeah, bikes. How does that hold the particular friction between subject, material and technique in this body of art over the past two decades of my making? It’s safe to say that I was invited to show at Lowell because of my bicycle drawings. Bicycle shadows are relentlessly visually engaging to me. For fifteen years […]
Growing up there was treasure in my basement. My father collected. There was all the stuff from his family: Victorian china and cancelled bank books and Civil War daguerreotypes and things he found in his life. After the war, that was World War II, and while he was out and about, he discovered katagami. You […]
This series came on the heels of a series of tiaras and the Evolution of Trust and Distrust (see “Words and Letters” in shows). Like most of my work, the making is a form of examination. Giving the elements shape and moving them around, I gain understanding of an experience that puzzles me. I was […]