words    images    objects

Permissible Artifacts (2003 – 2017)
The making of these assemblages and collages began in response to the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003. The work addresses a wide range of related issues: blighted cultural memory and disinformation, obscurantism, religious manipulation and sexual longing, murderous war.    raw pigment, oil, graphite, wax, wire, string, canvas, wood, letraset, stainless steel, found objects, computer circuitboards and memory chips, vintage polaroids scanned and printed, text fragments. Swipe to view, or use the buttons

LOBSTER FLATS (2010-11) an excerpt
The images in this book and print series were created by digitally manipulating a limited number of photographs into a theme and variations suite. The accompanying text was generated by feeding sentence fragments into an online text randomizer and sifting through the results. Swipe, or use the nav buttons below:

Lobster Flats began as a winter walk around a barren, dulse-strewn tidal plain on Grand Manan, the largest of New Brunswick, Canada’s rocky islands in the Bay of Fundy. Over the decades, local lobster men constructed a vast, interconnected network of containment ponds there, standing like stockades on a cobble and sand plain that emerges waterlogged from the sea with every ebb tide. Freshly caught lobsters are kept alive in these holding ponds until market time. At low tide, the wooden walls and tall poles that demarcate the rectangular ponds tower high in the air.

On clear and windless days the quiet ponds left behind by the retreating water become surreal reflecting pools, their slatted walls appearing to float in the reflected sky. Water gurgles and trickles underfoot, always on the move. After the tide turns and the sea rushes in again, all that protrudes from the surface of the bay are the forlorn tops of the weatherbeaten, walled pens.

That afternoon, a chill wind sizzled through the vertical wooden slats draped in seaweed, rope and netting, adding a treble-tone to the mental music I heard: a faint, repeating, patterned loop of low drones, clicks and snippets of song.

This work reformulates my experience of this unusual place.

Dragon Swallows Moon

Several years ago, troubling news set me in motion—wishing, wondering, delving into my photo archive, grabbing various images from the television screen, noting snippets of dialogue and conversations overheard in passing.

Revised and republished in January 2024, this 124 page work of reorientation is a parallel narrative of image and text with many branching meanings. In this journey, the who, when, and where of the images are not as significant as what an image represents — specific person, time, and place become secondary. The book can be read both forwards and backwards.

The phrase ‘Dragon Swallows Moon’ refers to a folk practice I encountered on the streets of Chiang Rai, Thailand. During a full lunar eclipse, throngs of smiling, yelling locals marched around in circles banging on pots and pans. Why do this? Because the dragon Rahu swallowed the moon, and he won’t spit it out unless he is distracted by a ruckus. It works every time.

Mixing information streams and blending worlds – the trick is to see the riddle.