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Bearing Witness

This body of work contains personal meditations on the parade of media news images punctuating our days. As an artist the sheer visual impact of these images compels me to pay attention, to bear witness. Fire, explosions, earthquakes, aerial shots of floods and hurricanes, pigs swimming for their lives in the floodwaters of the Mississippi, oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, have all have captured my awareness. Each day it seems there are new images and new stories; yesterday's paper is tossed into the recycling bin, and for most of us each image fades as it is replaced by the next.

Bearing Witness is a formal exploration of the shapes, colors, textures and composition of these images. It is my intention to pay homage to the people and places affected by each of these events, and to those who come to their aid. The work is made in the spirit of hope and human connection, and celebrates resiliency rather than despair. For me making this work is an act of reverence, a way of asking questions about the true nature of beauty, about what is important, and about our individual roles as we acknowledge that yes, our world has become very fragile.

It is not my aim to produce realistic visual records—newspapers and television do that remarkably well. The seminal image or story acts only as a cue. From this I allow the materials-- paint, molten wax, wool, found objects-- to translate and interpret, to extrapolate and transform. Through the alchemy of process this work becomes the physical evidence of one artist's experience bearing witness to our interesting times, and hopefully a template for the thoughts of you, the viewer.

Bearing Witness will be shown at The Dairy in Boulder, Colorado from August 6 through September 17, 2010.