Ruby's Dragon

This is what I do in the middle of the night while the rest of you sleep. My little stop-action videos have made me feel like less of a sleep-deprived lunatic and more like a hard-workin' artiste!! Of course most nights are still spent with my thoughts racing obsessively around in the dark.

Thank you Ruby for the fearsome dragon tattoo.

New Show opening August 14th at Cafe Racer

I've made a change of my plan. I can't work on this project right now. It's so sad and since I haven't been too happy lately the addition of working on this has sunk me lower than I thought possible in the summer. I also didn't feel right about rushing this work to finish it by the show deadline. I will pick this back up as soon as I feel healthier again. So for the show I am switching back to some drawings and paintings I had been working on before this project came to me. At least this way my work on the walls won't make Kurt's customers cry.

(This is a work still in progress of The Spiral Minaret of the Great Mosque in Samarra. It is something of an indication of the direction the work is going)

Most of the work relates to the devastating toll of the Iraq War in terms of Iraqi citizens and culture. This is a major departure for me artistically; I have never done work with political content. The majority of my work has been very personal, and I suppose this is as well at a certain level but via sympathetic feeling and reaction rather than any personal experience whatsoever.

I am generally so absorbed in exploring my own issues that I would never think to make any sort of altruistic statement or protest through my work. I initially stumbled across my subject by accident. I had been doing loads of research trying to find direction for my thesis, which usually devolved into my looking for my favorite works of art because looking at them made me happy but I pretended in my head that it was for research. I have always especially loved the art that originated in what is now Iraq: art from Ur, Uruk, Sumer, Babylon, Nimrud, Islam.

As I was hunting for my favorites I kept discovering that many of them had been stolen or damaged or destroyed since the Iraq War began in 2003. I then wanted to find out what has been lost and what remains intact.

I started to feel strange about being so concerned about the loss of art and architecture when so many people have been killed. I began researching how many Iraqi civilians had died, I had already heard reports of close to 300,000 but wanted to know if that was accurate and how that number was reckoned. In all my research the database of Iraq Body Count was consistently cited as the reliable list of identified deaths. When I read how many were on the database and how many more were estimated dead I was sickened. The only way I can describe how I reacted when first (and still) reading the Iraq Body Count database is to compare it to the reaction of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars when Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

When I get an idea for a body of work I usually see the finished project then have a flash of a high-speed sequence of each element of the work clicking into their proper spatial relationship. This is what happened here: I wanted to black gesso over white gesso on paper and board. On that I would make drawings of compromised artifacts or architecture, but instead of lines or shading I would carve the image out using the names of killed Iraqi citizens. So far it is coming together well with the visual and contextual impact being what I imagined.

Some may find this art offensive or heavy-handed or insensitive. I apologize to any who find it to be any of those, I mean for this to express my sorrow at this destruction of so many lives and the culture of the place they live.

My primary research sources have included Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.
I think that being aware of the frightening numbers of Iraqi civilians killed is very important for US citizens right now as we near this presidential election. There is no true count yet but Iraq Body Count has documented approximately 90,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. The true count is exponentially higher:

"This is a list of all named or partially identified individuals in the IBC database as of Saturday, 26th July 2008, together with some of the personal details that are known about them. This list is constantly being updated. The latest version of this file can always be obtained from http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/download/ibc-individuals.php Concerned citizens and advocacy groups have for several years drawn attention to Iraqi victims of the war in public readings and displays using compilations of names drawn from Iraq Body Count and other sources. In any use of these names please give due honour to the as-yet unidentified dead who are not in this list, and whose numbers far exceed the named or partially identified victims. For every identified individual on the current list there are another 21 confirmed Iraqi civilians killed for whom we do not have identifying information. In contrast, virtually every coalition soldier who has been killed can be identified by name and other biographical information.
There is no organised effort to name all victims of the war. Only when all have been identified and duly recorded can there be any talk of respecting their memory. To those who knew and loved and miss them, Iraq Body Count offers its condolences." -part of the explanation at the top of the list of names in the Iraq Body Count database.

12, 14, 16. April 2008

12, 14, 16 was my final project before the end of our school year. Of all the art work I have ever made this was by far the hardest, both subject-wise and physically. Visually I do not feel that it is among my strongest work, but was necessary for me to do in order to move forward with my art.

12, 14, 16 started out as one 5' x 36' piece that I stretched onto the studio walls and eventually cut into three pieces. It was visually inspired by Hellenistic sculpture, most specifically The Pergamon Altar. The female figures are made from my clothes hand-sewn onto the canvas which I had gessoed (you cannot imagine how painful it was to sew). I then used ink, sparkly dust, oil paint, graphite, and oil bars to create the environment and nauseating color. The appliqued photographs are taken from the window of my room I had growing up.

12, 14, 16 is a very personal work that addresses traumatic events which occurred in my youth and their aftermaths. I chose to address this subject in my art because it continually seeped in anyways. I felt that it was time for me to approach this subject in a direct manner rather than continue to not acknowledge where the darkness in my work comes from.

Most important to me was to illustrate reaction to painful events. In my mind it is important for people that hurt other people to be aware of the effects of their actions. And also for the person who has been hurt to be allowed their reaction.

I do not feel that I need to revisit the subject further in my art. I do feel that now I have addressed this so publicly I have no personal limitation in regard to the themes I chose for my work.

The Correspondence Project

The Correspondence Project was the main project I worked on during my second semester at The Burren College of Art. It expanded on my interest in the collaborative process. I recruited 14 writers from the USA and from Ireland. The 14 included professional writers, writing students, poets, song writers, amateurs, journalists and playwrights. Some I knew and others I had never met and found through placing an advertisement.

The only real limitation I set was that the exchanges would be easy to send and download via email. I limited my drawings to black and white as a quality control since color varies among computers and printers.

I sent each writer the same initial drawing. They then sent me a written piece in response. At that point the project split into individual correspondences between myself and each of the 14 writers. Some of the 14 correspondences were extremely prolific, while others petered out fairly soon. This was an expected part of the project and in my opinion was an intriguing aspect that made me question why did things end at the point they did.

For me this was a wonderful experience. It was challenging and rewarding. It expanded the relationships I had with the writers I already knew and introduced me to new people with whom I felt a strong sympathy of ideas. I had planned to continue The Correspondence Project until I graduated, but that does not appear to be possible right now. I renewed a romantic relationship with one of the writers while working with him on the project. With the failure of that relationship I found it impossible to continue. I may pick it back up eventually, but not quite yet.

I am currently contacting some of my collaborators and other writers to start a new project that will be similar to this one, but hopefully less in my control. I would like to initiate this one with us submitting simultaneously, inspired by the collaborative work of Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage.

Escape! November 2007

Escape! was a multi-media installation that was shown in The Project Room (part of the gallery space at The Burren College of Art). My show in The Project Room was due to be exhibited 5 days after I presented Come In and Visit. Due to this time limitation I chose to adapt and re-purpose many of the elements I used in the previous show.

One of the key things I learned doing Come In and Visit was how much I enjoy and appreciate collaboration with others as a part of my art practice. For Escape! I again asked Jon Rentler to collaborate with me. I was very impressed by his writing and also his generosity and enthusiasm. I wanted his work to not be overly influenced by words I used in explanation of the installation. Instead I built him a miniature of the finished installation and told him only that it was titled Escape! To my delight he returned with a series of amazingly creative investigative reports that provided speculative explanation of what took place.

This perfectly suited my idea for the space. I incorporated the cage, the barbed wire photos, redid the tree cut-outs, and the drawings of creatures with angst-filled eyes. I created a net out of the red and blue string that had made the web/ thought matrix in Come In and Visit, and projected Twirly Whirly a video of myself twirling around in the wind on top of the burren.

The concept behind the installation was escape from the cage and eluding all of the traps and barriers of my own making (literally and figuratively) - to freedom.

I was very very happy with how Escape! turned out. I felt that with it I was able to focus the creative chaos of Come In and Visit. Both exhibits helped me to realize that while I really love making individual pieces of art, I am most interested in using different elements to create environments that reflect the concept that I am trying communicate.