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
monoprint: pigment print on paper with hand-inlaid white gold leaf, wooden dowel and embroidery floss – 36 x 56 inches
Clock Town (2022) a print series in progress – large scale images range up to 80 inches in width.
There once was a world-renowned clock factory and a fortunate small town that relied upon it. After almost a century anchoring the community, the factory went south seeking cheap, non-union labor. Similar losses became the norm across what came to be called “the rust belt”, and pain from this grand betrayal tore at the fabric of middle America. Only now, decades later, is the complex bubble of honest work and white privilege that enveloped communities like these being recognized for what it was. Approaching this topic is uncomfortable, like edging through a thicket of memory, conflicting emotion and cognitive dissonance.
titles: slide 1) Dust Collectors slide 2) Arson Scars the Shell slide 3) Particles in a Beanfield slide 4) Drone View slide 5) Development Plan
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.
Morning Spent 2020
charcoal taped to the tines of a leaf rake, brush with india ink and coffee on BFK Rives – 36 x 22 inches
Literals
found object assemblage/collage/sculpture
an excerpt – images: Tim Trompeter text: Joseph Simas
