Artist Statement from the Panopticon/ GSLIS Show at Simmons College
Growing up in Philadelphia there was a beacon north where artists lived their mythic lives in bright blues and metallics. I was too young and when I finally got there, SoHo was breathing its last and the artists were moving off the island of Manhattan. So it goes. What was left became street culture. They took up the mantle, but graffiti and stickers and paste-ups can only be captured on film and only for a short time (God bless you Martha Cooper for capturing it all). But I found a small collective in California that gave me a way in. They started stenciling on old LPs that were too scratched to play. After experimenting on a bunch of albums I got at a friends of the library sale, I realized they looked like Petri dishes and I grew lines. These pieces are each a time lapse of a line: growing, expanding, becoming. It feeds on spray paint, sharpies and ink. Look deep and you can still find the zero second. What happens next is anyone’s guess. Now I have dozens of records that let the line grow in different directions. Here a root, there a flower. It is all flowing on the grooves that can no longer contain the original flow.
