Branching Out

I use high and low-quality art historical, archaeological, and personal references to understand the desire to connect ourselves to the ultimately unreachable past and unknowable future. Peripheral influences like ancient graffiti, universal collapse theories, and common mourning practices all elicit the allure of half-knowing something while feeling intimately close to it. I am interested in the impulses, nervousness, and other guiding forces that cause us to seek relationships to history, and how they inform our present-day interactions.

Membranes that divide types of transition states appear frequently in the work, to speak about time, death, and the “ushers” that move freely between states. Sea birds act as one kind of usher or harbinger, due mainly to their Jurassic heritage. Layered textures and other devices of obstruction slow the act of viewing and induce cathartic sensations of digging, burying and magnifying. Material shifts, symbols and looping of imagery are used to create visual formats for describing time as organized within personal relationships. The work takes form in fiber, installation, and sculpture, which often involve drawing, painting, and sometimes audio.

I was born and raised, through my teenaged years, in New Orleans. It framed my vision of life. It was and continues to be a place of extremes: beauty and decay, religion and ritual, custom and iconoclasm. From that experience, I acquired an excitement for visual matters: colors, forms and even artifacts. Having lived on the border with Mexico for ten years changed my view of contemporary culture and our collective social responsibility.

At the time of the “9/11” bombing of the Twin Towers, NYC, my sojourn as a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville on the Mexican border altered my aesthetic. Viewing the ambient drug wars, the desperation of immigrants, and the collapsing Mexican democracy due to endemic political corruption and perceiving the curious lack of commitment for dialogue to offer solutions for the growing racial division, wealth inequality, and environmental decline in my own nation, I changed my insular focus of my art to embrace more topical issues.

I taught art in four colleges and universities in various parts of the US for thirty-three years. During that time, I also aggressively pursued the development and exhibition of sculptures designed and produced at those venues.