Statement
"The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I turn my attention to places and objects from everyday life that are often unassuming and easily overlooked. From this baseline of common experience, I use subtle interventions to ordinary, often ubiquitous materials in order to unfold our awareness of our surroundings and destabilize familiar structures. Space, time, light, and language, as well as household dust and the pages of a newspaper all become the materials for this exploration.
From a distance, my collages give the appearance of quiet abstractions. As the viewer moves closer to the work, it reveals itself to be loosely formed grids of punctuation marks cut from magazines. I sift through the pages of magazines to isolate a chosen mark of the text like commas or asterisks, remove them one by one, and relocate them one by one to the page of the drawing. The density of the marks suggest this passage of time and, lifted from their original context, the marks become author-less. The basic elements of written communication are transformed into questions about the structure of language and its emotional potential.
In my installations, I am exploring our awareness of our immediate surroundings and our sensory connection to architecture. A drawing on the floor correlates directly to the vents on the wall, and the marks of the drawing are made of adhesive. They begin nearly invisible, and grow subtly darker as viewers walk across the floor. Over time, the lines become darker than the grey of the concrete.
Because of their subtlety, these pieces ask to be viewed with heightened perception, fusing our intellectual understanding of the work with a sensory experience. Everyday materials are lifted from their context, defamiliarizing the familiar.