Tension is something I welcome in my life and work. This arises from the desire to capture and extend fleeting moments of anticipation or impending catastrophe. Like watching an acrobat cross a tightrope without a net, you want him to succeed and you want him to fail. Confronting the unexpected, the preposterous coincidence, and other secret joys all have an ephemerality that excite me.
My studio is a place of reinvention. Building awkward moments elicits the surging discomfort of constructing a house of cards. At any given moment, everything could fall apart. Failure is a motivating aspect and an integral part of the process. Creating a tension between control and its loss becomes a performance element to this process that is almost slapstick. After turning my back on a particularly precarious structure, it might fall on top of me, or knock into a can of paint, pouring it all over my shoes.
Making connections between image and material is a way to highlight disruption of expectation. For example, relating an image of skin folds next to the wood grain in a piece of plywood. When something is there that shouldn't be, or is functioning in a way that it wasn't meant to; those moments of inappropriateness are what I look for. Something that is in-between associations can arouse a new part of our mind, allowing us to embrace the anxiety of the unknown.
Mundane materials like shingles, gutters, and burnt out bulbs are pushed to the extent of their possibilities. This transformation not only erases their prior function, it also changes their behavior. When employed as the stuff of my work, new and ridiculous associations emerge. The qualities of the materials begin to have expressive voices of their own, allowing the works to reveal a variety of attitudes. They become proud, useless, sleazy, vulnerable, awkward, etc. It is completely irrational to use a grouping of long glass bulbs to hold the weight of a heavy wall. But the circus humor that is brought about in trying to realize it is more important to me than the result. I will always want to experience a heightened sense of awareness and the thrill of the unexpected.