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Artist Statement
Conjuring
Utopia [no place]
I am struck by how often nature seems eccentric and strange. I am fascinated
by our culture's efforts to comprehend its peculiarities in order to find our
place within it, be it a quasi-scientific diagramming of a genus of flowers
in a glossy book or decorating magazine, the formal planting of a garden, or
the mapping of a trail so that we can experience the "wilderness"
personally.
And me? I deconstruct one landscape to form another
in an effort to better understand the tension between order and chaos, between
representation and abstraction, between nature and culture. In the
landscapes I encounter, whether they are real or exist only in pictures, I try
to make a place for myself. I walk the paths both literally and in my imagination
and picture myself as a permanent inhabitant. I collect images of plant life
and maps of gardens. Through study and collage, I transform their biomorphic
contours into idiosyncratic, abstracted sites of my own imagining; creating
site plans by "drawing" with pieces of the maps I've amassed. I blaze
a trail through a wilderness of my own making, running it through a fantastical
forest of shapes.
I find my place in my gardens—they are antidote
to the chainlink outside of my window in industrial Brooklyn and to the trash
blowing around my ankles. Into them, I can escape from the edge of everyday
chaos.
My gardens rescue me from the longing for other landscapes. When I am in my work, I am where I am. In my own wild gardens.