Artist statement
I work in a variety of media including drawing, assemblage, photography, video and text. My method, broadly speaking, is collage. I assemble disparate fragments and allow meanings to arise from their arbitrary relationships.
My field of inquiry is widely inclusive in scope. It ranges from folk tales and circus to Shakespeare and Brechtian theatre, from post-modern self-reflexive critique to existential problems of living authentically and from history and memory to the marvelous and the absurd. Many of my concerns such as the dialectic of utopia, disaster and survival are rooted in my early experiences including growing up with radical parents.
Narrative is central to my work both as subject and method. Much of my work presents a freeze- frame moment that evokes a much larger fiction – a fictive world not much stranger or more comic than our own. What may or may not have happened between these moments remains open.
My current work evolves from a long-term project which chronicles a community of travelling players, (some human, some almost human,) and their struggles, relationships and performances. For years I was using the name Lamb’s Performing Objects to describe this project. I’ve recently dropped that moniker as too limiting, and perhaps somewhat confusing to viewers, since a) there are no actual performances – only suggestions of or allusions to them – and b) “Lamb” is not an active character in the fiction.
Inside the fiction, one of the main characters, Blackie Schwartzkopf, has recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances. However, the strivings and creative efforts of his associates continue.