Paintings
My paintings embody an extravagant beauty. Using ornamentation from various cultures including Islamic geometries, Japanese cloud patterns, Spanish interlace, I am exploring ideas of sameness and difference, harmony and discord, the human and the divine. In taking these sacred and coded decorative languages into a new combination, I traverse fluid boundaries. It is a feminist and multicultural vision of inclusion, comparison, and disruption particularly poignant in this historical moment.
The trance-like elaborate patterns are painted by hand, often traced through the translucent mylar and then altered. The process is repetitive, obsessive, and devotional. Responding to the contemporary speed of technology, the paintings invite a meditative slowness. The spatial experience seduces and allows for sensuous dreaming.
Collage/Prints
These images transport us into the logic of dreams. They are meant to be places of the mind, little worlds unto themselves. The imagery is constructed through juxtapositions, revealing divergent systems and their points of contact. Like fairy tales, each springs from the subconscious but based on the specifics of real places and textures far and near, exotic and mundane. They induce travel as a state of mind, and suggest the simultaneity of cosmic events.
These digital prints are but a few samples from a large body of work. Each print is made from original hand-made collages which themselves exist on their own page in a hardbound book. This body of work began in 1997 and has been steadily ongoing since. There are currently over 1,000 collages in a total of 12 books. The intention for their final form is as Ultrachrome digital prints, in limited editions of 10, using archival inks on watercolor paper, measuring 11” x 14”. Each original collage is made as quickly as possible so as to access a non-linear, non-rational thinking and decision-making process through speed.