AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

I am interested in the role of the performative and pedagogic with regard to nature. The pedagogic version of nature is built out of images, photographs, paintings, and fictional descriptions that form a collective memory of nature generalized into sublimely grand views, majestic landscapes, and benign animals. The performative moments are the unexpected. These are the moments of incongruity or strangeness that call to question the original idea. I am interested in the shift from pleasant to dangerous. Each element of the installation has the potential to turn one way or the other. My work explores a physical world created by allowing several perspectives to exist in the same space. These views form a new, hybrid place, inhabited by a variety of creatures. Within the format of a ceramic figurine, landscape space is stretched, substituted, morphed and abbreviated. It is a world of apparent familiarity, but the pieces are intentionally arranged in an illogical manner. I use color, pattern, detail and decoration as clues for identifying a path through the work. I work on multiple pieces and parts at once, shifting scale and perspective back and forth among the elements. As I work, the visual manifestation of the ideas gets refined and defined as details are added and subtracted. Each piece is a part of a larger visual catalogue, both recording and investigating my experience of the world. Sometimes the images are more like dreams than factual accounts. Stories are altered and embellished to read more like a memoir than a travelogue. The isolated pocket of the figurine forms a window to a moment, pulled out of context, like a snapshot or a single page from a book. Rather than making the entire place, I am making close up views of particular details. The time and location are changing, so perspective can change from piece to piece. Each element is its own vignette, providing a place to pause within the landscape. I exploit the idea of a simulacrum in my work. Things are made to be ridiculously, almost naively simple, reflecting an “idea of” rather than having a relationship to any physical characteristics. They are a copy of a copy of a copy. The multiple is important in terms of deciding how much of something is needed for the illusion to become impenetrable. It also anchors the image in the general rather than the specific. I repeat the images as many times as necessary to seem obsessive or over the top. Eventually the image becomes the truth. In my world, the only thing authentic is inauthenticity. This place maintains a delicate balance, teetering between an ability to drift into an innocent wonderland or a dangerous nightmare. The shifting uses of scale, detail, and color within the idea of a ceramic figurine keep the installation fluctuating between realism and simulacra, fact and illusion and logical and absurd. The result is a landscape full of undetermined potential, ready to be explored.