Dark Star Nebula Print

In my pieces I use fragments of electronics. Pieces of a once functional piece of technology. The pieces I most often use come from televisions. I think a lot about television and how it’s the primary medium for our information, entertainment and often our inspiration. I archive the fragments in acrylic boxes. Sort of like a reliquary. Have you ever seen the tooth of St. John the Baptist at the Art Institute Chicago. It’s in a tiny glass container. Amazing. I also use organic matter. Primarily food. It is extremely interesting to me to watch it decompose. I’m fascinated by the metamorphosis that occurs. The changing from, let’s say an apple. A thing that can nourish us and give us energy can become a rotted core of spores and fungus. A thing that could make us extremely sick, maybe even kill us. Perhaps televisions and computers can do the same to us. Nourish us or make us sick. I’m not sure. So I take the fragments of two disparate things that exist in the work and combine them. Trying to make sense of the world. It’s sort of like Dr. Frankenstein trying to reanimate dead matter. I’m never quite sure what the monster will do but I am sure that it is oddly ugly and beautiful simultaneously. Like life. Or like a painting by Cezanne where there is a fixation on these forms of food. Similar to our fixation with technology, each cube is sick like the mind on too many drugs or the feeling you get when you can't find your cell phone. The boxes are like pixels of technology touching on a range of themes from the cartoon, to prison reform, all addressing the human expression of beauty and ugliness in nature. Like the rotting orange, something that if ingested could kill but at the same time be used as an agent to save lives.