PURPOSE
When Gulliver encountered the Island of Lilliput his scale was misread as a threat and was subsequently tied down with cords. This was soon reversed as his size was utilized as arsenal. I am interested in how our own individual identities are also in a state of restraint and propulsion. The figures in my work like the notion of the 'self' are in constant flux. Similar to Michelangelo's slaves they are suspended between construction and deconstruction striving to influence their own creation. This process is explored in my work through collage. Through the efforts of both addition and negation the work is a metaphor for how the formation of identity is a complex filtering and mitigation of signs that we defy, incorporate, discard and accumulate.

Smash Representation and Abstraction together and my work is the aftermath. As Boccioni was interested in the construction of movement of a figure, I am interested in the psychological movement and construction of the figure. I am also fascinated by and lament the effects of technological innovation upon our visual literacy. How we see influences who we are.

TECHNIQUE & PROCESS
Revisionism is center to my process as collage itself is a form of remaking with every new attachment. In this way I am able to approach visual problems that occur at each step from a higher level of knowledge. However, each positive movement operates simultaneously as a mode of negation. I am interested how a negative act can become a positive force and that restraint is always necessary for action.

Multiple layers of intervention assist this revisionism. I collaborate with Modern Dancers for the initial reference material. These photographs then become translated into digital form with the use of a Flash program that I wrote to replace pixels for pop-cultural logos. The computer then, introduces another mode of intrusion. I then print out these digital roughs, cut them up, and hand-collage the digital-collages.

I use a non-traditional technology in a traditional way. The shards of brands are essentially cross-hatched to blur their individual identification and to challenge the speed of reading of advertising and the immediacy of branding. The figure, which is composed of and fractured by these visual stereotypes moves in and out of recognition and the visual fragments are left to be reconstituted by the viewer.

Finally, this visual history (not history painting, but painting as history) is mapped by its own continued construction but also by line marks with pencil. Lines can be restraints, scars, sutures, scaffolding, supports, slings, tracks (past and future), nests, and bars. I am not just interested in juxtaposition, but that by plotting two disparate forces (construction and deconstruction), that a third unforeseen result can surface from the
latent data.