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“I have always had an admiration for things that are well made, or not even well made. What you have to make in order to live.” -Margaret Kilgallen
Cover Up, Love Letters, and Overcast
Our lives are all a beautiful mess. After 30+ years of being an artist, I'm taking inventory of my life. In the last year alone, I lost my dear mother, Fern, and my oldest brother, Teddy to illness. Aunt Janet, Uncle Joe, and Harriet died within months of each other. As if that weren't enough, Joe, Erin, and Wheels passed away. With every loss, I felt their absence hard. Now, I'm trying to come to terms with my own mortality and sense of the world.
My new work is a collage of experiences and moments, vernacular images and sympathy cards from my past. In this work, reused canvases, substrates, old drawings and discarded materials all take my own or other people’s surplus or rejection as the starting point. I'll never forget these wonderful people, without which my world would have been different. I'm a caretaker for their memories and transmitting these remembrances has been of great importance at this time, to my own alive-ness and bearing, as a 52-year old female artist, who lives and works here, with 3 kids, a husband, aging parents/in-laws, wonderful friends and my extended family and a pretty comprehensive beautiful mess that I needed to share with you today. It was recorded here, a year-long sketch book, a self-preservation moment and a much needed check-in and check-up for myself.
24x36, Silkscreen on paperbags,
This work is inspired by two art historical pieces. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed painting/combine-and the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile in Paris.
Rauschenberg claimed that a pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric. Rauschenberg was committed to absurdity, anti-art, the multiplicity of meaning, and im(bed)ding the messy chaos of everyday life. I had many bedside experiences last year of people who were sick, struggling, and in-hospice transitioning. I held their hands, put lotion on them, listened to their regrets and their life’s accomplishments. They told me stories I did not know about them. These were some of the most special and also the most common experiences in life. They are incredibly magical and ordinary.
My mom, a Francophile and lover of French culture would have liked this piece because the Arch is a symbol of the Iconic Paris landmark that has 12 radiating avenues extending out from its center to other destinations, much like a Star. My mom went to France for the first time in her life with my sister and I (and her good friend Margaret and her two daughters) when she was in her midlife years. This is a scrapbook-like tribute to her and those I lost this past year.
“How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.”
― Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire
32 years ago, I did this drawing inspired by Jasper Johns, The Seasons. Johns’ series of four prints explored artifacts and seasonal symbols to represent the epochs of life and the cycles of growth and aging. John’s shadow are represented in this work. This Serason’s was inspired by two works by Picasso, The Shadow (1953) and Minotaur Moving His House (1936).
Back then, I had a studio with 3 large windows , and like Johns, I recorded my own shadow in the changing of light and reflection I rolled up that drawing and stored it for three decades in my rafters. I was an idealistic girl back then and had big ideas of what life was going to hold for me.
I was arrested for an OVI in January of 2018 and unrolled the drawing in the midst of an avalanche of friends and close family members passing, 9 in all and during this loss and grief, I found solace in this work. It is all here-the covering up of an ideal past to a very raw, exposed beautifully messy bounty, as well as the hoard of life. And so it led me to a postcard in my studio that I have of the painting Guernica.
Picasso’s Guernica is my favorite painting. Guernica depicts the suffering of people and animals wrenched by violence and chaos during the Spanish Civil War in the city of Guernica. Guernica is 25 feet long and is epic and Picasso worked on it over a course of 35 days finishing it in June of 1937- 82 years ago.
Same Old
Routine and habit scare the hell out of people. Especially when you hit 50, routine plateaus us and an uncomfortable normalcy takes over. Politics get more party-line, we are loyal to our favorite cable news channels, complaints of the world increase, our love relationships shift with kids/parents/marriages, and our health and mental wellness lie in retrograde. We have a love-hate relationship with sameness, constancy, schedules, and instead we seek transition, newness, and things we want to fill our lives with, particularly to the things that are gone, achingly missing, those people that have passed on, the people that won’t ever be here again, life that will never to be the same.
The Last Bikini
My mom used to lay her clothes out on her bed to see how they looked. It was part of her decision making. She and I both like to be covered up. It hardly seems fair that about the age when a woman’s self-confidence is at its glorious zenith, it also seems to coincide with the breasts, belly and thighs heading south. This also corresponding with the time where women generally tell other women (or at least they think it) that it’s time to cover up.
I’m 52 and can count the times I wore a bikini past 20. As self-conscious as we all can be, how you are perceived matters-to us. We all are easy to criticize, judge, and envy other people, particularly women, and this work is about these moments where our vulnerability and truth can emerge-because we want to hide it or celebrate it or we don’t give a rat’s ass what people think. And, by the way, 47 is the age (in a study in England of 2000 women surveyed) that one should hang up the bikini forever.
Ive Come Undone Installation View
Charcoal Drawings regarding words that use the negative conditionals, “if Only”, “Unless”, “Otherwise” are the jumping points for these works.
These words are used to alter the messages and create double entendres and conflicting stories about human relationships, particularly marriages and parent-child dynamics.
These works are all drawn on handmade paper and reflect the sentiments after the idealism of marriage and birthing children have worn off. Errors, mistakes, uncertainty all run through these drawings.
Charcoal on handmade paper
These neon sculptures were accompanied by letterpresses note cards that were stories that related to neon works. People could take the handmade stories.
relief print, printed off boat oar, neon
Many of these text-based works were made right after the Recession,
There is a creepiness about Craig’s List, but also a feeling of comforting neighborliness. These on-line sellers desperately “want” and “need”, allowing us to measure our own sense of complicity, compassion, distrust and resiliency. Filmmaker Miranda July wrote, “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life.” These types of unfiltered stories transform the individualism of desperation into a relatable mythology. As a Social Realist, political and economic themes allow me to present personal protests edged with satire. New Deal graphics and writers like William Faulkner, Raymond Carver and T.S. Eliot are all major influences for their inclined brevity and storytelling intensity.
Sometimes signs transpire from an amalgamation of socio-economic conditions specific to Cleveland, casino openings, the foreclosure crisis, and in other cases, they are fabrications intended to resonate and reverberate with the authorial voice shifting, vibrating in opposition and sometimes collapsing altogether.
Wood relief
Infinity. Water takes us there and brings us back. I want to swim towards happiness and lightness. I want joy. I want to find those relationships and people in my life that offer me unconditional love and support. I don’t want to be judged. I’m getting older and wiser. I am filled with purpose to do thigs that I really care about with the people I share those passions with. I might not be here tomorrow, something might happen. I want to live fully without compromise. Life buries us sometimes. We lose sight of the powerful messages that come through intimacy and our relationships. Getting lost in another person liberates me. I’m excited by the possibilities. I’m in a boat on a lake heading towards infinity.