In February 2005, I started making collages as part of an art residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. I have continued making collages—a direction far removed from my primary performance practice of the last seventeen years—as my primary artistic focus.
My visual work is in some ways an extension of my performance work. In my performances I borrowed and re-configured found text into ambiguous narratives about longing and desire… go figure. My collages continue to explore many of these same ambiguous narrative strategies. I’m also interested in visual hybrids—human and animal interspecies—and symbolic strategies pulled from religious iconography.
My subjects are often characters. The image of the bird has held the strongest fascination for me. I see them as something ethereal or otherworldly, endowed with emotional potency. We squawk, preen, strut soar, prey upon, tremble and sing as we have learned to do from the birds.
My material sensibility has been towards strongly representational, coherent imagery with an attention to precise cutting and visual consistency. Visually I respond to the operatic shimmer, sparkle and complexity—the grandly narrated spectacle—of life. My background in anthropology and art history informs how I construct these collages. I’m drawn to the possible story within the fragment. I play with symbols and metaphors from art history, language, and religion to create new mythic realism.
