My father was a history teacher, and I grew up in a house with walls of teetering bookshelves and artifacts resting on any bare surface. The past, especially the ancient past, was a constant presence: revered and palpable.
I’ve held coins from the span of three millennia, and when I was an adult, he gifted me a necklace made from Egyptian beads that dressed a mummy within its sarcophagus. The past was present the way that it must feel to live next to a cemetery. It was present, but not alive.
I too am drawn to the past, but I carry a torch and search for signs of life, or rather, I search for images that make me feel more alive.
Usually, these are photographs of people who spark a sense of intimate recognition or a visceral yearning to know more about them. I use traditional as well as modern tools – including digital photography editing software and acrylic paints with bright pigments that may not have even been available at the time the photograph was taken.
I print archival images and use a latex-based plate to transfer their images to rice paper. I collage contextual elements into their piece; sometimes those elements may be contextual only in a contemporary sense or in a personal one.
My protagonists are not re-animated or re-written but rather become collaborators in their own re-incarnation as something distinct that is not bound by limitations of time and space.
This is a sort of aliveness beyond just being present as my father’s artifacts were. This is what I call “present tense”.
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