TOTEMS

I think of these assemblages as totems, like human presences, larger than life but silent. They are constructed from strangers’ discards – old objects, borrowed images, leftover wood scraps–that bear the marks of other lives and other locations, now dislocated to create a new narrative while carrying the ghostlike reference to their old stories. For me personally they talk about my dad who died unexpectedly in 2008 at age 68. They were my first effort to process those painful memories through my art, to give this private dislocation a visible form that honors his memory.