FRAGMENTS

–noun
1. a part broken off or detached.
2. an isolated, unfinished, or incomplete part.
3. an odd piece, bit, or scrap.

–verb (used without object)
4. to collapse or break into fragments; disintegrate.

–verb (used with object)
5. to break (something) into pieces or fragments; cause to disintegrate.
6. to divide into fragments; disunify.

PAID VACATION

As an artist working in the corporate world for the past decade – stuck in cubicles and conference rooms when I’d prefer to be in my studio painting, I spent ten years designing websites for other people rather than creating my own art. When I looked through the stacks and stacks of notes from unending project meetings and corporate training sessions, I realized that the conference room had become my studio. While designing large-scale internet applications for many different companies, I had also created small-scale works of art in the margins between my notes. This prints shown here are from the result, an exhibition entitled, “Paid Vacation: Drawings from Conference Rooms”. The titles were generated using an online tool I found called a Corporate Bullshit Generator. I think everyone who works for IBM has one built into their brain!

 READING THE BODY

Words are the wrong language for expressing emotion. There are things that simply cannot be put into words. Moods, emotions, feelings that cannot be labeled. My work is a visual journal which releases me from having to try to express these ideas verbally. 

It is about how the world sees people, and how that differs from what the truth about a person really is. 

Reading the Body is about how most people only see the outside, the surface decoration, and not the truths that lie behind the outer surface, inside the other person. Pretty, decorative, nice, but what does that have to do with what is inside? The layering, the camouflage, speaks to things we do to hide our true selves from the world, from people who may get too close, who may not accept the truth about us. 

The body is just the packaging we were put in but did not choose for ourselves. But the outer physical shell is not the truth about us any more than the personality that most of the world sees and thinks is the truth about us. Faces, especially the eyes, are supposed to be the window that allows others to see inside, but that is a lie. In my work the windows are obscured, because I don't believe that they show any more than what we want the world to see. The world, most people, see my smile, my jokes, and sometimes even confidence, and I know that none of these are truth. 

You have to go beyond the surface, search through the layers, pick out the truth from all the surrounding surface decoration, the camouflage, that hides the truth, the inside, from the world, from other people, from ourselves. 

If you can pick your way through the external stuff, maybe you will see what is really there. Or maybe I don't want you to see the whole truth. 

Figures emerge from the background, from the pattern, from the surface decoration, as the truth of a person emerges once you get past the external. It is about what we choose to show to the world, and what we keep hidden inside; how we reach out to others hoping that someone will see beyond the surface, but at the same time, afraid someone will. 

What we keep to ourselves, knowing that no one can completely understand what is inside, and not being able or willing to take the risk or trying and failing to be understood and accepted. There's also a delusion here... that we can hide what's inside. Sometimes people will be see past the camouflage, see into you despite all attempts at hiding.