Human social experience helps to inform how we build personal relationships. Our ability to form relationships manifests in a multitude of ways. My un-traditional family moved often, requiring us to establish new relationships regularly. Both parents worked in Social Services and we often were introduced to new foster siblings over dinner. Over the years my 4 biological siblings and I shared our home and parents with dozens of foster brothers and sisters. Many were of different ethnicity, and or, cultural backgrounds. Some were mentally or physically challenged or drug addicted. I once read that “all things exist in a mess of relations”. I moved away during High School.
As an Artist, I see these images as compositions, thematically interrelated. Layers of stereo types, projection, objectification, self-acceptance, discrimination, social and political in-correctness and interplay of relationships saturate the imagery with no real clarity of content.
These tight compositions invite in and challenge the viewer to recognize the unfamiliar. Your physical engagement in viewing these compositions, makes you now, a participant, “witness” to the still life, evoking memories of social experience and relationship building with siblings and others different from yourself.
