Trip To Here: Quixotities of the Public Sphere
Reproducing the hyperbole that defines much of contemporary American culture and augmenting its inherent eccentricities, my art plays with the public, the social, the comical, and the extraordinary. My work converses with and critiques the built landscape by creating more artifice within that landscape. Here, the real, the living, the found, the created, and the counterfeit collide. On pilgrimages throughout cities, rural and marginal spaces, I gather information, working as an archeologist of my own culture. Objects I find and social engagements I observe are suspended in a present context that often goes unnoticed, but is brimming with the potential for humor and quiet tragedy. A twist, tweak, or tuck of its elements enriches a culture deadened by the constantly quickening pulse of images, stimulation, and information. As an archeologist I begin to imagine a society based on my perceptions of experiences, probabilities, sites, and materials; as an artist I uncover a potential society. The original culture is still alive, however, and my society, which stakes a claim to reality, inserts itself and is integrated into the living one. Reality and the representation of reality intermingle.
In my investigation of the public aesthetic space, I mounted a fluorescent light-box sign displaying the face of randomly selected community members upon a streetlight on the University City Loop. The project, Face Value, investigates the commercialization of public space, espousing themes of image power, celebrity, recognition, and anonymity. A women's bathing suit with the president's visage, Bush Suit similarly engages the political space by divorcing clear meaning from politically charged images, rendering them ambiguous. In these works, absurdity is coupled with social commentary. The works retain their humor, however, and the viewer must mediate chuckles with discomfort.
Often, the audience finds that they themselves are the subjects of the piece, whether through self-reflection, physical proximity, or accidental contact. In three stages of Model for a Community Bathroom for Security Purposes replica toilet stalls question surveillance culture, safety, intimacy, and community in the most private of public spaces. The viewers' interaction within the piece becomes an intriguing cultural experiment. An example of this interaction occurred one afternoon as a small child in a stroller looked up to see Face Value. She pointed to the sky and said, "Mommy, look at that man!" The distracted mother said, "ThatŐs nice honey," and without glancing up, dismissed it as the whimsy of youth. Likewise for those who choose to notice them, St. Louis FUR Pipeline and Self-Serve Soft-Serve, imbedded in concrete and cast iron respectively, imagine the impossible as only a child can.
The work explores the actual and potential mythologies within under-appreciated physical and personal environments of our built world. It foreshadows an era in which people recognize and redefine their own spaces, claim them and create a public space that is a swirling composition of individual's characters, a wryly self-reflexive and absurdly stunning creation.