ARTIST STATEMENT 2008

Is it possible to move beyond the fear of obsolescence? Is the fear of it as important as the guaranteed fact of it? I wonder. John Baldessari once said that “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers”. What are the necessary questions, then, for contemporary makers of meaning to ask when even ‘art’ itself can include the “possibility of terminality”? Inspired by these questions, I am working on an ongoing series called Gift and Baggage of Body, organized around the medieval Christian Book of Hours.  The devout would recite prayers from this book during a specific hourly cycle each day.  Matins, the earliest of these hours, is the literal starting point for the perpetual consecration of time through ritualized behavior, but it is also a useful metaphor. It is a marker for renewed awareness, a promise of possibility, an assurance that the present moment has an indelible link to the past.  It takes ‘now’ and connects it to then’.  Conceptually, all of my work references my interest in time and its literal or metaphorical impact on the body and the mind it contains.