1985 Sentimental Rigors and Distance

Inspired by Renoir films of first love, a feeling part of everything, alive and sexual, and the fall that follows of fragmentary identities. The slippery relations between language, images and unconcious desire practice within the space of excess. A way of keeping desire at play by holding satisfaction in suspension. A form of insightment offers a series of tensions that enrich our collective capacity to think. A series of languid circular gestures. If the doors of perception were cleansed, all would appear infinite. Many of the works incorporate disembodied eyes, which represent the pure activity of viewing. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Roland Barth’s Camera Lucida, that sees the photograph as death’s trophy.

Nietzsche; “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten, metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force”. The Nietzschean sense of vitalism that “mere animal consciousness” is actually the “exulted” condition he seeks.

210. THE CACODYLATE EYE

60X34" (RACETRACK)

study for The Rose-Croix

209. Sleeping Fields Sigh As I Glide Across Their Spine

Searches for a new kind of scale, the relationship of part to whole.

Joan of Arc, in her death, returns with a fuller human presence. Forged figures, suspended like a kite on a string. are interspersed with sand and shellac give the canvassed wood the appearance of satin.

Il s’agit d’une nouvelle vision ou’ le spectateur retrouve son isolement et entend le silence du monde.

197. I AM THE ONE THAT SEASONS THE PAIN FROM YOU

A three dimensional wood sculpture deals with antagonism and attraction. I use 8 hearts of wood going in different directions, extrapolated from Giacometti’s game boards from the 1930’s. In their centers are holes where maps are laid.

198. FAIT DIVERS

Exploring issues of multiculturalism and sexual identity. A line from Andre’ Gide’s The Immoralist, “ The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind and reveal the authentic being there. The Proustian atmosphere of longing and regret, concealment, vulnerability and self-protection becomes a symbol of depersonalized desire. Through film we become “copies” of objects that may never have existed. I started using the hollow, or silhouetted figure to suggest a sense of fragility and absence. Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites who defined the remote influenced me.

200. THE INTELLIGENT OBJECT (a subset of the male gaze)

Like Duchamps stretching the laws of physics to preserve the energy created by someone beyond their death, the work is about what an artist leaves behind.

203. Caesura

The word was used in Greek and Latin poetry, meaning the pause near the middle of a line. In the work, crisscrossing broken lines indicate the relationship between two reflections dealing with the identity. A benign interplay of beauty, esthetics and their not always comfortable relationship to sexuality. Selective disclosure becomes a form of empowerment, investigating the role that multiple perspectives, play in the conception and perception.

204. THE SCOPE OF NATURES GARDEN

Oil and cloth on mixed media

A woman in a scarf sits in a teacup with the abstract geometry of a skull facing her, the skull partners’ death. Two skulls gazing in opposite directions, greeting the beginning and the end. The cup’s original function to hold liquid, broadens to connotations of totality.