“I Made My Bed, I’ll Lie in It,” charcoal, graphite, gouache, 12 ft x 9 ft, 2010
“The House That Lies,” charcoal,graphite, ink, 17.5 ft x 9 ft, 2010
“Limbs Wide Open,” graphite, ink, charcoal, 17.5 ft x 9 ft, 2010
“silent screens (the absence of a heart)”, mixed media, 17.6 ft x 9 ft, 2010
While not the best documentation I have, it is what I have on hand…these are the pieces from my exhibit, “Nobody’s Home” that was at the spinning plate gallery for the month of May. Hopefully you can understand a little bit of what the show was like.
These four drawings were made specifically for the windows of the Spinning Plate Gallery, converted from an old auto dealership on Baum Boulevard, Pittsburgh’s legendary automobile row. It is at a busy intersection, thus in plain view of both pedestrians and drivers alike.
When I decided to make these drawings and allow them to be in plain sight of the public at all hours, it was out of a specific desire for the experience of the passerby to be surprised, to find something unexpected, and to evoke an emotion close to my own. To explain further, these drawings stem from the end of something between two people – a relationship, but maybe more than that now that I’ve finished them. Someone famous – who I can’t remember right now said (maybe Kentridge, Bourgeois..) that drawing is our way of understanding ourselves. In this work, I was trying to understand things that happened. In our lives we are constantly negotiating for and reaching out for that connection between people, strangers even. People hurt each other all the time, in these constant messes of right and wrong. I was trying to navigate that through this kind of visual language. Guilt and shame, and complete and utter confusion — I wanted chaos on paper, I wanted to show mental space I had where nothing was really making sense, and where I know people have been (possibly) before. It’s about failure, as it always has been.
