Biography

I am an artist and an art critic living in Chicago. My writings may be found in Art in America, Sculpture, Flash Art, ArtPapers, as well as other reknown publications. I have curated exhibits for such institutions as The Spertus Museum, The State of Illinois Museums, Wood Street Gallery, U-Turn E-zine, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. I have lectured at various institutions and universities in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and Indonesia.

In mixed media paintings I incorporate photos from travels in the United States, Southern Africa, India, Turkey, and Tibet into fields of abstract painting, often in a hanging scroll format. My digital images, depicting similar elements in different combinations, are entirely composed on the computer. I approach my digital work as a painter does: I build up, section by section, segments of photos taken from different sources, adjusting each part in relationship to the rest.

Recent digital works are fictional places using elements from my travel photos; on these I layer sections of the corresponding page in my passport and/or related maps. Thus the tension between an image that looks like it could be real, while including deliberate discrepancies, represents the memory of an experience, creating an uncertainty about any absolute understanding of our world.

In all these works I address issues related to how people construct meaning and a sense of identity for themselves withing the context of a diverse world. In particular, my travels and sojourns in diverse places stimulated an examination of how the visitor, the setting, and/or the people are affected by their mutual encounter. As such, I also explore the idea that all memories are constructed from both the "real" and the invented.

I began working with photographic images while I was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, taking a course called “Generative Systems,” in which I began taking Xeroxes of ordinary things: rice, celery, shells, etc. I then began to combine them with drawing and painting. After I graduated, I made artists’ books and explored painting. Several years later, I started thinking about taking my own photos and incorporating them into my books and painting. At that time, computer systems were not developed enough for me to scan and print them, so I took them to photo labs (Like Helix) and had them printed small in scale. I then combined them, through the years, in different ways, combinations and formats, changing my painting along the way. I used them with colored pencils, gouache, oils, and now, acrylic paint. About eight years ago, I heard about a transparent overlay material called Lazertran, and I started using it – first, as I had in the past, small and surrounded by paint. I also experimented with materials, such as mylar, aluminum, pellon and watercolor paper and began using my computer to scan, combine, and print my photos at home. The photos are getting larger, and now I’m using them by sectioning the images into pieces (6 for smaller paper, and 9 for larger) to cover the entire sheet of heavy watercolor paper. With these new works I began to paint under the transparencies, adhered the transparencies over the paint, and then I painted over the amalgam. I now cover more and more images with paint, particularly in my new series, titled “Untitled #1 Israeli Desert Series, etc. The photos for these current works were taken on a trip to Israel about 3 years ago. The works are becoming more and more abstract, and they give the feeling of the Israeli desert rather than the information about it. Since this direction is just beginning, I will probably be working in this way for several years.

Representation

Chicago: Flatfile Galleries (digital work), Perimeter Gallery (paintings); San Francisco: Toomey-Tourell Gallery; New York, A.I.R. Gallery; Internationally, galleries in Belgium, Poland, South Africa, The Netherlands, and Indonesia.

Recent Exhibitions

Invented Travelogues, Flatfile Galleries, Chicago Il. 2007,
Paintings, The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006
Invented Travelogues, Gordart Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006
Spatial Meditations, Soscielak Gallery, Breslau, Poland, 2005
Meditations on Ruin, Flatfile Galleries, Chicago Il 2004