In my practice, I explore issues related to visual perception and personal and historical memory, through looking at everyday things. I make color pencil drawings, working with source materials, such as personal photographs and everyday artifacts. I follow a certain vibrational quality of my subjects, through tracing local color tone, and how that tone resonates and changes in various contexts. At first, these drawings may appear to be photorealistic renderings, but a second read reveals them to be interventions between daily moments and gestures. Key to my creative practice is a shift to the textual, to the study of writing forms.
I am in the research and writing stages for a project that retraces a childhood trip in 1972 Czechoslovakia, which focuses on place and memory, and that moment of life just before adolescence, where there’s magic and movement. During this time of movement, I was literally moving, on a road trip with my family, driving across Europe. This project is a long-distance phone call to my younger self, with the intention of pulling aspects of that self—an object of introspection and reflection—into the present. This project is in support of a future publication, a creative non-fiction book of essays, tracing my cultural and artistic sensibilities alongside larger historical events in Central Europe, and specifically in the Slovak Republic. I am interested to see how the truthful recounting of the personal story, and considering the fluid nature of memory, can change a larger understanding of historic occurrence, rendering larger histories in smaller truthful stories.
In my dreams, the output from this project extends to film, based on my photographs and memories from different eras in the Slovak Republic. The film collapses the scene of one incidental street moment, depicted in a photograph from a 2017 return trip to Central Europe. The working idea of this film situates within texture and movement that spark unexpected poetic associations across time and subject matter. This single image points to my preoccupation with small, deliberately ahistorical events, many of them retaining the fascination of a time diffuse between past and present, further enhanced by the timelessness of the up-close interiority of this one image.
In the end, this work returns to the still image, its tonic center, as I imagine it. Photographic moments are rescued, as if from a restored film; to uncover a masterpiece. This process tracks an iterative practice of layered multiple segments and pieces, and even selves, representing old and new, in a kind of collapse of time and matter, elegantly laid out and seemingly connected, but not touching; the gaps between galvanize to form an irreducible whole. Electric.
I’m experiencing the world as being malleable and changeable, through my creative thought processes and intentions, and through expansion into the new media and platforms of sound, moving image, and especially studying writing forms, as well as working with the energies I perceive around me. And through looking back at a pivotal year of change and transformation, pulling the magic of that year into the present.