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ARTIST STATEMENT for “AMERICAN DETRITUS” (found objects)

Objects have power. They carry with them stories of past use, past users and often a history that we, as their temporary custodians, can only guess at. This becomes ever more poignant and dizzying in the context of our consumer culture. We throw so much stuff away. Useful stuff. Cool stuff.

I seek redemption for our collective guilt by transmuting this so-called trash – the lowest form of human productivity – into the highest: art. This work is a form of a modern alchemy, a stratagem where refuse is collected, reformed, enriched and returned to the refusers.

I invest relics and rejected materials with new life, not only acknowledging their presence in the world but also honoring their history. Acting as their temporary curator and repurposer, I proclaim my own presence.

This box and its contents were found intact on the dumping floor of SF Recycling and Disposal while I was the artist-in-residence there in 2005. I merely added electroluminescent vinyl to the inside of the box to illuminate it, in the hope of letting this collection of objects tell their own story about their previous anonymous owner.

ARTIST STATEMENT for Paintings

These paintings are small dramas or the stages for such productions. They contain a rotating cast of characters and props repurposed from not only their original use, but also from one production to another, like itinerate actors. In simplest terms I take what would ordinarily be considered junk and through painterly slight of hand transform them into something more.