CRACKED PLASTER

Digital Collage C-Prints on Aluminum Panel

40 x 50 x .75" - Limited Edition Prints

Fiction is a shortcut to truth. I'm compelled to manufacture fictional vignettes from my large and growing collection of photographs, hand-marbled paper, paint, ink, and other mixed media and sculptural materials. Working in this way allows me to investigate and attempt some understanding of the absurdity and complexity of our world.

Ever since I can remember, I've been interested in houses and buildings. I grew up in a typical, economically designed Mid-Century tri-level house at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I remember my parents building a new one when I was four that rose out of the dusty high desert ground onto a concrete foundation and sprouting a wooden skeleton that rose two stories into the clear dry Colorado air, then capped with gray asphalt shingles and clad in horizontal siding painted yellow. Our family of five moved in just before I started Kindergarten, and the sixth child was born after that. The house eventually sheltered ten of us in its ever shrinking and claustrophobic spaces. It was the house where my mother went mad, and my father escaped to work twenty-four hours shifts at the fire department and worked odd jobs on his days off.

I'm interested in how houses and buildings are a refuge from the world and sometimes a torture chamber to be escaped from. I'm interested in why some buildings are so unpleasant and some so inviting. I'm interested in the social identity and status we derive from our homes and the stuff inside them. I'm interested in the disposable nature of buildings in the United States. I'm interested in the entropy that often happens to the physical structure. I'm interested in the "ghosts of the house" which linger in the occupants' minds long after moving on to new homes. I'm interested in how people live their lives out of the public eye and what goes on in their heads when the garage door slides to a close at the end of the day and no one is watching.