Shredded Documents
Shredded Documents, which is comprised of twenty-two works, is a material investigation in which a variety of media have been dismantled to create assemblages that penetrate the structural underpinnings of the art-making process.
The duo As Far as the East is from the West and Then I saw a New Heaven and a New Earth are large pieces constructed of shredded comingled religious and scientific documents, as well as shredded photos, recycled maps, writing implements, and traditional art making materials. The resultant imagery references the look and feel of ancient maps whose early cosmological perspective belied a deeper conceptual longing for something more than just mere material understanding. My own cartographic wall reliefs embody what the ancient maps merely suggested—the laying bare of “the guts of the matter,” both physical and spiritual. In the material coinherence of the scientific and spiritual, I seek to embody a solution to the cultural contradictions of our times.
While the circles of the maps represent an attempt to portray the cosmos as a holistic unity, the circles of the Snap Shot trio represent the attempt to capture the world within the visual image. This series also involves a similar manipulation of media, which include discarded and shredded photos, photo canisters, pens, pencils, and markers pilfered from a local photo lab. This paraphernalia is recast to visually mimic the structures of conceptual photography, including the aperture and lens, turning the camera back in on itself and making it the focus. The resulting pieces add a new dimension to both the photographic and found object art-making tradition.
With the Superscopic duo, I happened upon a trove of medical documents which I comingled with prescription bottles, recycled prescriptions, various pills, and writing implements, and amalgamated into a block of matter. I subsequently sliced and abraded the surface to expose what was embedded therein, creating petri dishes teeming with life—or, at least, creative potential. With Migratory Slice, that teeming potentiality seems to be evolving—and on the move.
In others of the series, such materials as crayons, pencils, erasers, markers, plastic bread baskets, and various types of shredded documents also emerge from the primordial soup of manmade detritus. With these works, I continue the quest to understand the nature of genesis and generativity–the artistic act of creation whose dynamism is no less miraculous than the splitting of a cell, the dividing and multiplying of the loaves and fish or the emergence of communiques from the depths of the world. In everything, the dictum of Kenneth Burke is embodied: The medium is the message.
