Artist Statement
Glass is always present in my work. Paired with drawing and painting, and used in a collage-like manner, it’s there to call framing into question, and how glass itself frames, connects and alienates us from one another. I aim to defamiliarize us from glass’ role as mirror, screen and curtainwall, to disentangle it from notions of technology and “progress” and to re-see it as a stranger among us, ever-present, absorbing and transmitting our search for reflection.
Though my work has often manifest as glass objects, my process is rooted in drawing, a subject that I’ve taught for decades. In the past few years I’ve combined drawing, painting, and glasswork in an even deeper dance with one another. The works I am in the midst of making, have just shown here in Los Angeles (documented in this application) and the work that I hope to continue making with your funds, are about this dance between opacity, gesture, the see-through/not so see-through, and the reflected. The words of Layli Long Soldier in her poem "Vaporative" always come to mind when I think of the visual dance I am after:
"To say, I’m interested in this painting on glass brightly opaque...Say I am writing to penetrate the opaque but I confuse it too often. I negotiate instinct when a word of lightful meaning flips under / buries me in the work of blankets."
