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2020-2022 — Abandoned II

About this series

2020-2022 — Abandoned II

My work here dates from 2020 - 2022, and its impetus lies somewhere between the great "memory scribes" I'm fond of, as below, and the classic God's Own Junkyard by Peter Blake. Abandonment implies that the object or scene in view is imbued with memory and its variants: remembering, recalling, reminiscing, forgetting, being forgotten. This place is where my photographs are trying to go.

My small paintings are more personal, a reflection of my response to untimely deaths and the untimeliness involved in learning about them. Hence their abstract nature.

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. - Walter Benjamin

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. - Roland Barthes

Four photographs were shown in the Latitude 37 show at the Arvada Center referred to in the résumé - Southern Colorado's unique history, scenery, and culture has been a source of imagery and introspection for centuries. This group exhibition features contemporary artists living within the 37th parallel, capturing a wide swath of Colorado's Southernmost cities. Works are a variety of medium and type, all celebrating the impact this region has on artists.

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