Perhaps an irony of contemporary life is the significance we place on paperwork, on proper documentation. Such reliance on conceptual agreements and contracts spelled out in text across the surface of so many transitory sheets, charged, rewritten, annulled and then often discarded, can be a bane as much as they may seem necessary to civic order. But, of course, both the handwritten promissory note and the printed covenant are preceded by the handshake, by the nod and the wink, and other unspoken corporeal signals of agreement where the body of each participant is physically involved. To those shaking hands their promise to each other remains an invisible idea living on in their respective memories to be recalled at will, literally as a reminder of their reciprocal pact. And then, probably in-light of the specter of distrust or forgetfulness, paper gets involved as a neutral third party, a kind of ephemeral witness, across which the language of agreement is scribbled out as an evidentiary note indelibly inked into natural fibers.
How often have we encountered the demand: “show us your papers’’ as if being bodily present with a stranger is no longer enough to prove that you exist as the person you say you are. As you know, this is mandatory at border-crossings, because it seems to matter where you place your body in relation to others on the surface of this planet. The western world is perhaps a culture of selfish claims upon our shared terrain, the earth. We fight over territory, profess ownership of a stretch of water, snatch chunks of the common ground for ourselves first by naming, then delineating, then defending, and eventually legitimizing our presumed ownership with a piece of paper.
My creative endeavor aims to flow in a contrary direction, to bring papers, saturated with the multiplicitous articulations of language, so often accompanied by a ubiquity of images, back to embodied presence. Working with commercial print media at a variety of scales I aim to reinvigorate found papers into symbolic expressions that reference a more grounded existence in a shared world; papers that are no longer just for reading or gazing, but are for touching and being touched by, literally and metaphorically.
Collage, of course, is not a literary artifact, and neither is it a purely visual phenomenon of distanced contemplation. It is gestural and synesthetic; it should provoke the body both in its making and its receipt. It is not a titillation of sight, though nevertheless having a visual dimension. It is a material phenomenon, a work of corporeal engagement with matter, it is a precipitation – layered, sticky, wrinkled, tonal, wrapped, creased, colored, rubbed, bulky, textured, torn, erased, excavated, folded, layered, splayed, encrusted, smoothed, peeled, fibrous, obfuscating yet revelatory. Every collage is an outward gesture rather than a solipsistic introversion. Each collage both unearths and lays bare in paradoxical acts of covering up, but through this tensive process figurations of possible worlds coalescence from the collaboration of fragments. Because their materiality is sourced from a common terrain, they manifest identities that are as much you as they are me, and in that sense, I suggest, they are as much us.
So here, voluntarily, I show you my papers, incomplete as they inevitably are.
