~stillifewithshadow

A Rochester, NY based arts and culture magazine "The Good Life," interviewed me about my work about a month ago. I scanned it somewhat poorly. But on the plus side, they called me: The String Slinger...



[link]

[link]

I had to write one of these recently. For anyone who might care.

My work is a broad panorama of miniatures, depicting mankind dealing with the conditions and terms of his existence, literally dwarfed by his situation. The sculptures are all part of one larger sculpture, as well as self-contained scenarios.

The scenarios attempt to calculate the result of man’s inquisitive mind confronted with a mute universe. How does a population deal with simultaneously grasping for truth and meaning beneath this overarching and terrifying uncertainty? The sculptures attempt to depict poignant results of this equation: what we have made to hold on to. The umbrellas which protect from the madness of weather, but isolate, the magnifying glasses of analytic and categorical thinking, and the masks of identity, all stand as puzzle pieces in a growing symbolic vocabulary, used to economically convey the pertinent issues within the varied scenarios.

The size of the work is intended to literally put these problems into a useful perspective. The characters are presented first as part of a macroscopic situation, where the viewer looks down upon them as if out of an airplane, an alien’s eye view. Then pulling them in, nose to the edge of the work, to notice microscopic differences, details. This process is valuable in that it offers the placing of individual differences firstly in light of broader similarities, describing a population of individuals, acting out from the same essential condition, in different ways. On the ground level, religions and identities often clash towards violence or stuttering misunderstandings. Whereas, if the broader common wellspring of these differences is located, empathy can be the alternate result.