During my career, I have often been drawn to work with illusionary space and architecture. This has varied from building structures between mirrors; to using lines on the wall to interface between the scales of small mounted object and big wall architecture; to “making” paintings on paper that look like photos of bas-reliefs. My current light installations use light reflection, shadow and architecture to create artworks that seem to rest somewhere between object and image.
Because of my personal inclination and technical background, it’s been a delight for me to be an inventor with materials during my career. After discovering and developing the technical processes that begin a body of work, the subsequent artworks flesh out the potential of the process, and at the same time I learn to refine the process. These focus shifting discoveries of material manipulation, happen on a regular basis, and every three to six years seem to thrust me into new arenas of “making”.
In the exploration of this current process, there’s been:
Experimentation with the light source -- different types of bulbs, beams, color temperatures.
Development of a copper mirror for copper light reflection, in conjunction with the primary silver mirror.
Development of methods of making the metal patterns on the glass.
Development of a studio technique to create laminated safety glass, with the metal image encapsulated between the sheets of glass.
From my aesthetic point of view:
These installations are simply presented, but with a specific accuracy in the placement of both lights and glass planes. There’s elegance in the attention and directness of what’s occurring. This is a simple and yet sophisticated concept, that’s been developed to have an intelligent and sometimes striking presence. Another important quality of this work is the phototropic aspect. People are attracted to light, and many is the hand that has entered the light beam of an installation to try and understand what’s occurring. The high-tech flavor from a low-tech recipe adds to the creation of the sense of wonder that envelops these works.
And for me the best pieces seem to have fulfilled their own special sense of truth and beauty.