• 1sameopenemtinessinstallview
  • 2hereinthesametyus
  • 3sameopenemptiness
  • 4sameopenemptiness3
  • 5sameopenemptiness4
  • 6sameopenemptiness5
  • 7sameopenemptiness6
  • 8sameopenemptiness7
  • 9sameopenemptinessspider


These installations of four-inch square panels are about the way I perceive my own life as a sequence of small, intimate, non-linear but inter-related moments. It’s about wanting to hold and understand the infinite by containing it in a palm-sized space. All of my work, and especially these installations, have a strong connection to poetry. I’m interested in the way that a poem resists the reader, creating multiple layers of meaning. I like a poem’s economy of language, and the way a poem’s meaning evolves for the reader as the reader evolves. For this reason, the installations are comprised of a sequence rather than a series of images; instead of variations of a single subject within a genre like my portraits or still life paintings, these panels depict inter-related unique images intended for reading like lines in a poem. For this body of work, I use the multi-layered glazing technique of the Flemish Old Masters to create illusionistic space that is as much about its reflective surface as it is about its content. My images are containers for metaphor rather than literal things of the world. The strict definition of dimension and placement of panels is used to address ideas about mathematical precision, the measured, mapped, and ordered and its complex relationship with the immeasurable aspects of fluid time. Each four-inch square panel is placed exactly four and one half inches apart in a horizontal line sixty inches above the floor; no design elements like a grid compete with the intended reading of one panel at a time. What I know about the images as the artist is not a definitive reading, however, as each viewer is invited to create his or her own narrative. Though my installations are named for lines from poems, they are not illustrations for the poem, nor do the poems directly point to any intended meaning for the artwork. Instead the titles stand for my invitation to the viewer to seek out the poem for its own sake.