artbydado

One of six with an Irish mother with deep Irish ancestry and a Jewish father with largely unknown ancestry, I have always been interested in loss and retention of identity and story in changing contexts.   Consequently, I have been drawn to using conventions and expectations identified with one medium to create work in other mediums while integrating past icons into pieces that identity with art and artifact. 

Identity is entangled in the conscious and the subconscious.  Consciousness is indispensible to human existence and progress.  Yet, too, subconscious reaction has power immediately to draw and to hold one rapt.  Art bridges the two.  It is a sentient realization of being, a connector to thousands of years past, with the immutable capacity to transform. 

I started using toss-away objects -- modern artifacts -- as my primary material for drawing because these physical containers, conduits and connectors are modern artifacts that hold to a prior functional identity that must be shed yet need not be fully let go to assimilate into a non-functional drawing -- the physical object put to abstract use.  I connect and straddle the identities of the containers, conduits and connectors by collapsing, inflating, stretching, folding and otherwise altering them into points, lines and volumes, completed by light and site position. 

Use of identifiable discards encourages pausing, contemplating and confronting what it means to be accounted for, present and acted upon and culpability over what often gets tossed away, physically and metaphorically.

Developing preservable work that appears disposable, I often find myself thinking that the sense of our ancestors entering the darkness of caves and leaving markings that still illuminate us today epitomizes the capacity for creative transformation, and  yet, paradoxically, the transformation inside the caves survives for us to witness today because it lay hidden and protected from view for so many thousands of years.   Once discovered and revealed to us, this work must be actively preserved by us.

Detail:  Winged Shadows 2005