beauty call

Black Venus, 2005, Mixed media collage, 130 x 196 inches

“Maybe it’s about mapping or tracing the ghost of cities past. It’s the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath. It’s the reference and the details that point to people saying, ‘We exist; we were here.’”

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"Analog", 2004, Collage on canvas, 125 x 125 inches

“I have a labor-intense practice- cutting and cutting, which is grunt work, almost mechanical. That’s foreground. But what’s going on in the background is a thinking process that’s very slow, almost like a meditation. Improvisation is what I like. I limit myself materially- another way of slowing myself down. When there are too many choices, I get confused. So I tell myself something like, ‘I’m only going to use black paper.’ It puts pressure on my creativity to make that black paper sing.”

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"Backward C", 2005, Mixed media collage on canvas, 84 x 120 inches

“I do really large-scale paintings. The one I’m working on now is nine by thirty feet. And somewhere in that landscape you get lost, completely lost, inside the body of a painting. You don’t know where you’re going, and it’s not speaking to you, but you just keep moving through it and you find your way. You find a space that looks familiar, and you make your home there for a little bit. And you don’t get too comfortable because you’ve got to charge off again.”

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"Potable Water", 2005, Mixed media collage, 130 x 196 inches

“It’s all the interconnected secrets and overlays that I really find interesting in public space. I guess I keep talking about that. Why not private space? Because private space is private, and public space has the potential to be inclusive.”

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Images and quotes via PBS