Our bodies are
at once containers of our most intimate physical spaces and surfaces with which we present ourselves to the rest of the world. In these living houses, we juxtapose the human skin's sumptuous, delicate sensuous qualities with its rough, strong, protective functions. The body is a physically remarkable place that has the capacity to exist in communion with its environment, for the betterment of both itself and its environs. Despite this power, a narrower, more impotent version of the body is glorified by a media and a social culture bent on limiting sensual experience. These institutions commodify bodies and sell their skin back to consumers as "the genuine article." Consumers buy into these images and lose creative control over more than "mere appearances."

My work attempts
to unmask this transaction. Whereas advertising culture gives us a fixed notion of the body and compels us to purchase this unitary image, I look at the body as a site of creation, rather than consumption. In a given piece, I will deliberately mix in elements of bodies from various sources; cutting off, distorting, and unconventionally juxtaposing various segments as I work. My sources are both man made and "natural," my materials are both temporary and long lasting, my authorship is both evident and anonymous. Thus the pieces are portraits of no one and everyone, they repel fixed definitions; their subject is a body in a constant state of presumed disembodiment.

Each series is made whole
when it is viewed as such by the viewer. Pieces that retain their fractured identities when viewed separately, take on a new life when repeated and juxtaposed with other, similar pieces. The self-contained completeness of the subject, established by the framing and pictorial conventions of the western canon, is questioned when the subject is literally and formally "a piece" of something else. Incomplete bodies, deliberately framed as parts of a whole incongruously arranged together, compel the viewer to reevaluate his experience of the physical.

I aim to empower
a living, active experience of the body by creating work that challenges the viewer to respond actively to it. In my work, time and motion are frozen and conflated in a space that evokes the abstract, in materials that resonate with the particular. The limits of the spaces represented in my work are rarely finite, though each microcosm takes up a fixed amount of space in the here and now. The environments roll off the edge of the page and the viewer is invited to imagine what happens beyond the corner of the canvas as he creates his own context and ascribes his own coherence to the work.

The canvas becomes both a map and window;
the sculpture becomes both a model and a site. The viewer sees something, makes and takes something from it, and uses that to his own ends. The generative process in constant and goes both ways; the object itself changes under his gaze; he is also seen by it, taken from, made and used by it. The body is recognized as a question; rather than as an answer.