I will be featuring new assemblage work in the exhibition, Placiness. The work on view will range from the representational - paintings, drawings, and photographs that directly confront the cityscape - to constructions that incorporate materials and objects endemic to the region, and much that falls in between, all the visually inspired by the streets, buildings, history, landscape and humanscape of Seattle.
(Left) Pedestal for the Fleeting (Right) Humid Humming of Summer, 2016
Breaking from the restraints of the square or rectangle, my work is constructed of parts taken from specific times and places, moments and histories. The parts that I assemble are considered for both their narrative as well as their formal qualities. These artifacts are personally found and collected as well as gifted and inherited, serving as conduits for memories and metaphors. When arranged together as a collective set or composition of color, shape, texture and form, they rouse the senses of unspoken and interpretive reminders and possibilities. The words of Rebecca Solnit materialized as I sifted and contemplated my collection of objects in an attempt to follow the objects back in time and decode the secret constellations of the past.
“It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Placiness coincides with the art happenings of Seattle Art Fair and Out of Sight featured this Thursday, August 4th through Sunday, August 7th. The show will be open on First Thursday, August 4, from 5-8 PM and 12-7 Friday and Saturday, 12-5 Sunday. 57'Biscayne is located on 110 Cherry in the Good Arts Building in Pioneer Square.