Annunciation

Annunciation includes drawings and sculptures (wall-mounted and free-standing) enacting the same analogy: two disconnected forms or “figures” are seen not touching, about to touch, or just after. The negative space between forms takes on a weight, presence, and sense of movement like a line.

This scene is reproduced serially, typified by Intersecting—One, a line drawing in space in which unearthed bottles from the artist’s home soil support their translucent foils. The casts, fabricated with water-soluble paper and methylcellulose, retain the form, trace residue, and text of their masters. Various materials (sand, gravel, straw, dirt, water, methylcellulose, and ink) inside the bottles offset the weight of the “lines” (found iron chain, oak branch, rope, armature wire, steel, copper tubing, lead solder, and dried flowers). Intersecting—One is specific to the installation site, an unused clay workshop repurposed as an artist’s studio and gallery space for the spring term. The room is adjacent to the building’s ventilation system; a high-powered fan intermittently pushes warm air through the space. Different paper casts move with varying intensity depending on the number and location of spectators.

Inside and Surface consider the materiality of stained glass and its potential applications as surface and mark beyond traditional fabrication processes. Surface highlights the accidental, eccentric circumstances surrounding the act of making, privileging the observational period in an object’s life, between fabrication and documentation, where intent or interpretation emerges. Inside gives the impression of a once descriptive, figurative scene that has been deconstructed and reconstructed in content and actual material. In Late Fragments, the diagonal alignment between the two forms shifts to a vertical relationship where the “heavenly” glass and “earthly” paper forms are distinct, no longer interchangeable or intermediaries.

Annunciation attempts to represent the spoken word in wordless space by translating elements of the poetic process (revision, rhythm, lineation) into objects and images. The works form a series of elegies on loneliness—the solitude and ecstasy of having a body in space and being a body in space—that treat disconnection as a harmonious state more essential than connection.