Temporary Garden. Enamel, acrylic and mixed media on canvas mounted on panel, 36" x 75"
The Confection Series
The Confection Series* is concerned with themes of cultural overlap and dislocation, and comment on the proposed deployment of US military bases, dubbed “lily pads” throughout Central Asia and North Africa.
Lily pad Deployment: A most horrid misappropriation of words by the American military machine: conflating the name of an ancient flower held as a sacred symbol of rebirth for centuries in the very regions where these bases were sited.
In palimpsest style, stylized images of lotus flowers and water lilies drawn from ancient and contemporary sources swirl upon background grids of industrial patterns and 18th Century textile designs. The background patterns were created with layers of pigmented pulp imbedded during the sheet forming process and followed by layers of enamel. Derived from an elaborate process that combines digital technology and traditional media, the hybrid compositions blur the distinctions between the aura of the original sources: culture, nature, mass produced images and political commentary.
* From information designer Edward Tufte’s “confections”: hybrids of different data, annealed and cooked into a single shallow plane
“THE ARTIST MUTATES A LOTUS FLOWER INTO EXPLODING, CARTOON-LIKE FORMS, KNOWING THAT IN ACTUALITY IT GROWS IN MUDDY WATER AND RISES ABOVE THE SURFACE TO BLOOM, THUS SIGNIFYING IN BUDDHISM RE-BIRTH AND THE PURITY OF HEART AND MIND. BY TRANSFORMING THE LOTUS INTO AN EXPLODING FORM, THE ARTIST COMMENTS NOT ONLY ON EXTERNAL EVENTS OVER WHICH SHE HAS NO REAL CONTROL, BUT SHE ALSO FRAMES THE VIEWER’S RELATIONSHIP TO ART.”
