Devotionals
The Shrines illustrate my obsession with revering objects that most consider useless by placing them in a context of worship. A rusty bolt, a broken window or a chunk of battered wood is freed from its former mundane purpose and is now elevated to a status of pure beauty. What we discard says more about us than what we keep.
The Dragoman's Key series is new work from December 2020, where I experimented with a more intentionally bright color palette with the Shrine format.
The Signets are inspired by potent and expressive characters I see in Asian styles of calligraphy. They are meant to be stark and cryptic, and any resemblance to actual characters is purely coincidental. Essentially, they are a simplified version of the Shrines, which were done several years previously.
The wooden frames in the Dream Gate series are made from sections of a 30-year old fence that I knocked over with my car one night when I came home. There was a girl in the front seat next to me and she had distracted me. All the baubles inside and around the perimeters of the boxes are things I collected over the years because I found them curious: my brother’s old toys, antique Christmas decorations, old photographs, etc. They came together by way of esthetic considerations rather than by themes. Though each little object has a sentimental significance to me, I find them more interesting when put together out of context.