interior studies

Interior Studies

FOR a while I rented a small, somewhat derelict apartment to use as a studio. There I developed a practice in which I draw on the walls, stopping at various points to make an 8 X 10 negative of the drawing, often incorporating various collaged objects or appropriated images. The process is continuous, moved forward through constant revision. The extracted photographic records are treated as finished, but the accumulation of such products reveals that the pictures evolve with no particular telos: imagery appears, disappears and reappears and the chronological order of the prints is not always certain. The "real" or original drawing has come and gone on a wall in a run-down apartment somewhere.

Exhibited in groups, the prints begin to describe, literally, an interior space. On some level, this work is about my sense of how difficult it is to place my cultivated modernist interiority in a postmodern world. Our model for the self is shifting from a depth paradigm to a celebration of surfaces. I draw on surfaces, which nonetheless construct an interior, though not an unbreachable one. The audience does not visit the actual space, but the inhabitant delivers a steady stream of attempts at coherence, based on the constant influx of variably filtered stimulation.

Does the private life of the self creates the space for autonomy and engagement?

I developed this process searching for a structure that allows me to embrace unpremeditated impulses. My adulthood as an artist took off when I studied critical theory and the tools of cultural studies, but I have become interested in working methods that allow the unconscious to operate within a consistent set of givens. In this series, the parameters are the walls, the 8 X 10 format and the transformation from drawing to photograph. Formally the structure follows a logic like that of sampling: disparate motifs, styles and iconography come together for a recombinant moment, proposing only provisional wholes.

The subject matter derives from my life-long interest in the shifting boundary between our concepts of the natural and the artificial. In method and content I am exploring the implications of reproduction -- of images, of products, of genes.

I use the 8 X 10 negative documentation of the drawings to make palladium prints. Made by applying a light sensitive solution by hand onto drawing paper, the results can look as much like a drawing as a photograph. Photographing drawings yields a confusing hybrid of the two media, technologies of the hand and the machine. Technology, the survival adaptation for the human, begins with the hand and becomes mechanical. I'm interested in the instability of the categories we use to separate the body and technology. When does technology become alienating? When do we call it "unnatural?" These questions arise increasingly as we multiply our powers to alter the forms of life. Throughout history the definition of what is natural changes constantly and is always tendentious. The big question remains: what kind of world do we want to live in?