So much, and a little more

Two inclinations compete on a regular basis in my mind.  One is to stop the information flow, stop the inundation of images and thoughts and sounds and words.  The other is to make images, a compulsion to add my two cents to the pile.

My aunt’s house burned down a few months ago in the mountains near Boulder, CO.  At the time I thought, what a simple way to purge.  How much can we retain, collect, accumulate?  And to what end?  At Crozier, thousands upon thousands of precious works of art are stored in temperature-controlled rooms.  On my bookshelf there are more books I haven’t read than books I have read.  At times this overwhelming quantity of information and objects feels physically heavy, a pressure on my chest.

And yet, I am still compelled to create my own images.  It is a means through which I process all the information I receive, and more particularly, my experiences.  I make images to catalogue.  I am the indexer of my life, and I index through images.  In this sense, making pictures can be a highly private endeavor for me.  At the same time, I also make images to communicate, as a way to enter existing dialogues or start my own.  I’ve never been a particularly strong writer, though I love to read, and so I see images as a viable means of expressing myself.  For me, this form of communicating through images is vastly more interesting than anything I could compose using words.

In a way, I am in conversation with anyone who sees my work.  I am saying this and that, through my images, and they are responding that and this.  Yet, I do not need my dialogue partner (the viewer) to necessarily be talking about exactly the same thing that I am.  Meaning that I hope that my work can touch upon identifiable ideas, but also that it can function more as a catalyst for further conversation than as an endpoint.  I make work to process my thoughts and, at the same time, ideally to create diving boards, places from which one can leap into different conversations and make new connections.  Openings.