Tuesday, May 26, 2009








David Burns recently curated me into a show at the Armory Center in Pasadena, "The Drama of the Gifted Child," which takes a look at artists who are still active 5 or so years out of grad school, a milestone generally accompanied by an enormous attrition rate. I'm actually intimidated to be in such good company, Julie Lequin, and especially Kelly Sears. For this show, I was offered the ammunition room in the armory, a long, narrow room with ragged cement walls, electric panels taking up wall space and a heavy metal door hanging open at the entrance. It really is my kind of place!

The physical space of the gallery got me thinking about secrets and compartmentalization. The images in this post are some of what came from that thought process.

I blew up an image of a little boy from a black and white school photograph. The boy was pushed to the farthest edge of the frame, and the enlargement shows the space where the original image ends, and the backing board begins. I then decided to manipulate the image in as many ways as I could come up with, and frame the pictures in found frames of different sizes.

Some of the interventions are fairly simple, spraying the figure with glow in the dark paint, so that he'll take on a ghastly green glow at nighttime. Other images have more elaborate and detailed drawings scratched into the surface of the print. I tried a new technique in which I scratch an image into the plexiglass so that the print remains intact, but it the photograph is disrupted by something that alleges protection.

While making this work I was thinking about ghosts - as a concept. Ghosts are ultimately psychological disturbances that are so profound they take on a supernatural life. They are inseparable from human psychology, devices that obfuscate the personage, acting from the deepest corners of the subconscious. (I think that's something photographs do inheretly, but that's a much longer posting than this!) My goal was to create an installation that references the psychological space of the Gothic Novel, the space where the corporeal and the imagination fight. But to frame that fight in visual terms - much like literary tricks of shadow, the figure is overcome, by the symbolic order, again and again.