The over-arching presumption of my creative endeavors is of a singular, shared cosmos of which we humans are ineluctably ensconced, and which claims us. By virtue of our bodily participation, and confronted by the common limitations of our body's perceptual capacities, their limited reach, we are destined to represent that originary oneness to each other through the intermediary language of gathered fragments, shards of a broken vessel, the full nature of which our human imaginations anxiously attempt to recreate by bringing the pieces back together in new and elaborate ways, meeting places for a diversity of contributors. In making new work I hope, at least, to incant by analogical gesture a sense of the common whole, even while accepting, with an all-too-human melancholic joy, the futility of that task.
I was fortunate, once again, to spend a month in France this past summer at La Porte Peinte, an artist's residency in Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy. All the works on paper in this exhibition were made in Noyers with papers from old books acquired at 'vide grenier' flea markets in this picturesque medieval village.
For the first time I am showing several accordian-style books that I constructed with Indian hand-made paper. The first one of these I made earlier this year and is titled 'Garden City.' On the reverse side of its pages is a poem made from text fragments titled 'Spoiled.' Like the work on wood panels that you see in this show, these books reflect on the possibility of recovering shared civic space from its stultifying subservience to the banal orders of consumption and profit. Instead, they ponder a hope that, as the architectural philosopher Peter Carl insists, the city might rediscover its role "a framework for the ethical interpretation of the natural conditions."
