Experimental Procedures:

My creative process involves the selection and arrangement of found images into compositions that consist of unexpected juxtapositions of vaguely incongruous elements. After the appropriation, re-contextualization, and digital manipulation of my source material, I output the image on an inkjet printer, and then coat the print with several layers of encaustic wax and oil paint. The encaustic both enhances and partially obscures the graphic image, giving it a tactile, translucent quality. The result is an image that is at once electronic, mechanical, and hand-made.

The source imagery in this body of work originated as hand-engraved illustrations that were reproduced en-masse, in 19th century commercially printed materials and medical texts. Victorian-era medical imagery intrigues me because the subjective morbidity portrayed in the many illustrations of injuries, illnesses, and procedures affirms my own personal attitudes toward illness and the human body.

My real fascination, however, is the role of the engraver who, lacking the mechanical and electronic imaging devices of our modern era, attempted to produce by hand scientific renderings that were as objective as possible. If the object represented is a surgical tool or pharmaceutical item, this is a fairly straightforward task, but when all or part of the human body is processed through the eyes, mind, and hand of the professional engraver, mechanical objectivity is not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is this subjectivity seen in the faces, gestures, postures, and expressions of the textbook figures that draws me in and provides fodder for a great number of potential narratives.

I draw much of my artistic inspiration from the work of the Surrealists, who defied rationality and combined seemingly incongruous elements often using chance occurrence and automatic thinking process. My process of working with digital media disallows a truly automatic or subconscious approach to my work, but I try to be as instinctive as I can and rely as much as possible on my subconscious whims when making my initial reactions, selections and choices.

This does not mean, however, that there is no conscious agenda or thematic meaning in my work since I consciously choose to draw from the antique medical imagery as a point of departure. Yet I have no good explanation for my idiosyncratic fascination with the human body, pain, illness, and medical procedures, other than a vaguely Freudian assumption that I must be suppressing a long forgotten psychological trauma from my childhood.

My affinity for the work of Frida Kahlo fuels my work for I share her “black sense of humor,” and her “taste for the gothically shocking.” Kahlo also referenced medical texts in her paintings, “to explain the mechanical part of the whole business” as she sought to come to terms with her physical condition and the medical treatments she endured. Like Kahlo, I frequently combine mechanical and organic forms, emphasizing the most unpleasant aspects of both.

Echoing Kahlo’s distrust of the machine, my own strange hybrids of suggests to the viewer something ominous and draws upon our collective anxieties in a world where potential biological catastrophes loom large, where good science is halted by irrationality, and where bad science is encouraged by the market place, in our current political climate in which ethics go largely ignored.