TakLume Print

In the parlance of today's theory my work is, has always been, pluralist. Despite periods of heavy emphasis, there's never been a time when I was engaged in a single discipline. This interest in multi-specialties (including decades spent as a text poet, visual poet and film historian) has given my art a broad spectrum of influences. My practice in each field has evolved in a nonlinear way, exploring different styles and developing techniques that eventually became what I'd call an internalized methodology. It is said that appropriative art generates meaning by selection and recontextualization, while abstract art's meaning is more the result of invention and a quest for autonomy. I believe my art benefits from both of these systems. Found source material is dismantled, turning it into raw material that is used to produce completely new work. This art has pronounced formal qualities and stretches from the outside limits of representation, both textual and figurative, to various kinds of pure abstraction. The aim of my practice is to stimulate the viewer's imaginative contemplation. While I have no program, one context that has been important involves the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, whose aesthetic concepts do resonate with what I'm trying to achieve. For Deleuze a world seen without the spectacles of habitual subjectivity is made possible by assemblage and transmutation, opening up the strata of familiar consensus reality so that art can activate a virtual bridge to other worlds, which are also states of becoming in this one.