Curriculum Vitae

Statement 6/23/08

My paintings began to form in response to the idea of loss and its psychological consequences. The focus is not cause or reason, but rather its unalterable existence and the indelible impression it creates.

In October 2007 I traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant to embark on a project that would join together many of my visual interests: trauma, memory, and physical presence. From October 2007 to June 2008 I lived in Naples, where I partook in the chaotic and lawless atmosphere of the city, and which became a departure point from which to spend many days at the ancient city of Pompeii. In Pompeii I spent countless hours drawing the plaster casts that were made of the people who were found dead from the original eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD when Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other outlying Vesuvian cities were destroyed, and thus preserved for posterity. These plaster casts were made from the empty cavities that the original, now decomposed bodies, had left behind, and are astounding in their emotional impact. They are, in fact, an embodiment of what I had been dreaming up in my studio for the past year: people just like us, lifeless, yet eternal; present, yet forgotten.

In the restoration lab where many of the bodies still lie outside of the visitor’s view, I was amazed to find so many bits and pieces of rock, all lying about, some arranged in shapes in an attempt to reconstruct a fresco or ceramic object, others in boxes. Where did the stone or clump end and where did the bit of humanity and history begin? I found the process akin to artistic discovery and I began making black and white paintings that, like the ruined bits of pieces, were an attempt to discover human shapes within stones and objects within boxes to rediscover the “forgotten forms” of art: namely the human figure, and the deep emotional, hidden power that painting can have. The denial of color allowed me to concentrate on form and to keep the elements of painting elemental, and on a par with the deceivingly simple task of making forms out of the void.

My work from this past year is therefore involved in an attempt to make sense of life in Naples, a once grand city, just like Pompeii had once been, but where now corruption, crime and chaos have taken over to reveal a ruined city that must live inundated in filth and garbage. It was an attempt to excavate the hidden, mysterious elements of a people living a daily tragedy and continuing through in spite of it all.