1988 VALISE cycle

Concerned primarily with identity issues.

Ulrich Beck’s, “Risikogesellshaft”, and a “second modernity” witnessing the breakup of the social institutions that provided shelter to the emerging society. I attempt to create a disquiet stemming from a kind of agoraphobic space.

Dwarfed nocturnal figures render the viewer psychologically vulnerable,showing states of transition-morphing people into landscapes.

Layering is both a technique and metapor, maintaining that edge of multiplicity and contradiction.

The concept of border, essentially wanderers shuttling endlessly between roles and functions, never more then temporarily integrated into any enterprise, offering an Esheresque view of private versus public space.

Mentally shape-shifting to the situation in the mechanical and technological structures that we’ve built up around ourselves.

Inspired by the writings of Wilfred Owen ’s, Anthem for Doomed Youth.

233. MASADA (earth)

Site of a Hebrew mass suicide, seems to embody the passage of time and allude to all the history that the Earth has impassively seen, as well as the metaphorical “dust to dust”. The work refers simultaneously to shelter and passage, blending male and female genitalia—long and protruding, like the penis, oval like a stylized female cleft.

236. VESSELS OF MEMORY

A half suitcase with horns. the suitcase, an evocative symbol of transience.

A post-apocalyptic message of abandoned baggage from a world left behind, It represents all one’s earthly possessions forced by circumstance, constantly uprooted.

In the center, a glass transparency of weather worn headstones in verdant settings. Lit from inside, a chilling symbol of self-performing double identity.

Provocative juxtapositions resonate as necessity being echoed of the inner conflicts of modern man. Inspired by an old Twilight Zone

the last pitch

I constructed a plywood contraption that unfolded out of a suitcase.