Curatorial Projects > Rebellious Integration

"This body of work is an omniscient focus on personal experience. It is investigating the rooted ness of daily life while questioning what is behind it. The process involves recording what is specific to the communities that the artist is a part of and then constructing an elaborate, fictitious environment from them. The work transitions between space and place, the physical and the spiritual and the actual and the ideal.

Some buildings and objects embody discord but it is through this juxtaposition of dissonance and consonance that they are beautiful. As Alain de Botton states in the Architecture of Happiness,

"If certain balanced buildings touch us, it is because they stand as exemplars of how we might judge between the conflicting aspects of our characters, how we too might aspire to make something beautiful of our troubling opposites."

The work is speaking to the idea that just like our buildings there is conflict and tension in and around all of us. Beauty, happiness, and joy are only realized because of its opposing forces that loom alongside it. The work is at this junction, suspended between two opposites and longing for change.

Through the exploration of these opposing ideas the artist hopes that the viewer may attain a sense about the transformative power of experience and the mystical aspects of their own reality.

The catalyst for the print "And…" was some old wood type that I found while I was a teacher's assistant in the Kranzberg Book Studio at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. I used a Vandercook Press and rubber based inks to print various type fonts on Mylar and Reeves BFK. After printing a wide range of wood type I cut out each piece. I then used the process of chine colle to adhere them onto 8x8 sheets of Reeves BFK using an acid free bookbinder's glue."


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