FORMATIVE YEARS
I spent my formative years in a cluster of low red brick buildings in Northwestern Queens, just a bridge ride away from Midtown Manhattan. This body of work, created from fragmented family photographs of a bygone era, was not intended to be autobiographical. And in fact it is not. It just looks that way. These images are part reality, part fantasy, part dream, part imagination. Is this somebody else’s childhood, or mine? I don’t remember that moment, or do I? This project caused me to give some serious consideration to memories and how they manifest themselves as we age. And how do we represent our ideas about our memories in a visual, two-dimensional, format?
I think it is safe to say that most people do not have memories that resemble moving images, frame after frame unfolding in realistic clarity. For myself, and I assume for others, memories come and go in flashes and blurs. And as I age my memories change. I’m not always clear about what actually happened and my shifting view of what happened. I use the imagery and compositions in this body of work to communicate these sensations. In addition to the pictorial images that are reality based, there are incongruous and unexpected elements that flow into one another seamlessly. This is accomplished through the drawing that I do to enhance and alter my surfaces. In this way I create an illusion and only the viewer can decide what really happened or existed in the past and what didn’t. I’ll never tell. Or maybe I just don’t remember.