Catharsis

Read, believe, understand, know, delete.

Important Thing to Know

Every contact leaves a trace.

Artist Statement

I remember this day from my childhood vividly. I was three years old and it was a gloriously sunny morning at the zoo with my family. I was sitting on the shoulders of my Uncle Dave, and I wore a bright red baseball cap to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. As we watched a giraffe happily chewing on some leaves provided to him by his keeper, it stopped chewing and awkwardly walked over to the fence where we stood. The giraffe stretched his long neck down over the fence, and gently took the baseball cap from my head, and retreated back to the center of his yard. It was an amazing experience that I told people for years. The only problem with this story is that it never actually happened.

How could something that I remembered with such detail be a figment of my imagination? This is the question that drives my work. How is it that images and scenes are perceived, stitched together as memories, and then recalled? How are memories created of events that never took place? How do five different people have five different memories of the same event?

Salvador Dali once said “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” Memories are like circles, never ending, no beginning, constantly trying to find an origin. Take multiple memories and try to stack them together and there are gaps; small spaces that require interpretation to fill in the details. It is in this place that I find myself; trying to fill in the gaps, trying to make sense of what I am seeing and of what I am feeling; trying to create an understandable thought out of unintelligible pieces. It is the ultimate conundrum, and it is the inability to find the solution that keeps me searching.

Tick, Tick, Tick...

Well, there is no avoiding it. Every minute that goes by gets us one minute closer to the next residency. I, for one, am thrilled that it is nearly upon us. I feel like I have had a very productive semester of work, and I have to get it out someplace where people can see it.

I was very pleased with the baseball photos that I made a couple of posts earlier. These scarred circles, remnants of stitches, simultaneously simple and incredibly complex. Miles of thread wound into a ball, stripped of its hide. Some were already stripped, some I helped a little bit, curious to see what lay underneath the peeling skin. It’s similar to the fascination I have with picking at peeling paint, glue, tape, or chewed gum stuck under a desk (I know, gross, but I can’t help it).

I then took these photos a step further, allowing the weather that contributed to the appearance of the baseballs to contribute to the appearance of their prints as well. I made large cyanotypes, using the sun to create the image, and let the negative stay on the paper until the wind blew it off, allowing nature to control the length of the exposure as well.

I am fascinated with these results. So this is where I am on June 1, 2015. Paraphrasing Diane Arbus, this has all become a question about a question. The more I figure out, the less I know.