Four Voices - 2015
Meyerhof Gallery, Baltimore, MD
My process begins with an awareness of place and the way it is seen, experienced, and remembered. I am interested in addressing the distinctions of place and its ever-changing context through a poly-vocal and multi-modal practice.
By inhabiting multiple voices, and examining what place means to each of them, I explore the mutability of the human mind and ways in which we position ourselves in the world. My work grows like rhizomes, spreading laterally but growing separate roots that anchor each voice to the specific modalities of observation, abstraction, memory, or sentimentality. I’m interested in each voice being a re-experience, or re-arrival to the idea of place.
A flux of living conditions in my youth has engineered a specific interest in how environments affect the individual and how personalities adapt and react to surroundings and occupants. If we all have different opinions on what place can mean, it is also appropriate for our notions of place to change with context. Each voice has its own character, parameters, and principles, yet they are connected to a unifying concept (much like rhizomes are connected but, if broken, can continue to grow on their own). One voice addresses the sentimentality of objects and their relation to “place” as home, another activates the empirical “place” of the gallery, the third deals with the action - “to place”, and the last voice explores the intimacy of objects as triggers for memories of “place”. I explore the complexities of these limits through the demarcating of boundaries – treating them as investigations of alterity and otherness.
I seek to encourage active perceptions of place and to delineate their boundaries. Whether boundaries are physical or sentimental, real or imagined, it is their delineation that addresses differences while also uniting place with modalities and individuals.