On a recent trip to Taiwan, I found a time-stained book about bardo, a Tibetan term for being in between states. It described what I was feeling; in between being young and being old, passing from one phase of life into another. I'm drying out. I'm turning into beef jerky, and that's ok? I tell myself to accept the nature of impermanence. I make art to practice forgetting, letting go, and dying. Ironically, my sculptures, installations, photos and prints cannot shake the desire to remember, to hold on, and to live forever.
At my studio, I habitually shuffle stacks of 4” x 6” photos like tarot cards. Images of myself, family, friends, school, home, work, and travels were made with my Canon point and shoot camera and processed as c-prints during my adolescent-to-young adult years between the 90's to early 2000's. Lately, I have added digital c-prints from the mid-2000’s until the present to include imagery from my full adult-to-midlife years. Near and distant memories are deciphered to reflect upon the past, clarify the present, and foresee the future.
Some of these photos are set aside to be embalmed in clay while others are excised and inked to produce high contrast rubbings on medical drape sheets. Both processes are destructive in their intent to preserve and notably involve the transition from wet to dry states. Clay and paper expand as they are hydrated and contract as they are desiccated. The material characteristics of my work metaphorically parallel emotional and physical expansion and contraction across lifetimes.
At Binghamton University’s Elise B. Rosefsky Gallery, I have made a field of drying racks to receive natural light from two large picture windows. These racks are handmade from unraveled coils of pliable galvanized steel wire straightened into approximated lengths, woven into porous, gridded panels, and folded into standing tents. Thousands of threaded knots bind various points of intersection to stabilize their irregular structures. Precariously, they support the weight of my ink-stained memories on white medical drape sheets. From what I have gathered about beef jerky, thorough sun drying can prolong shelf-life indefinitely.