» Installations #2

Blog #216 8/1/17

Installation #74, Art Institute, Chicago;
UW Study #3170.

Installation #82, Whitney Museum of Art, NYC;
Human Body Study #1216, E. C. Taylor

I wrote about this subject, creating imaginary installations, last fall, in October. For any artist there’s always the desire to see one’s work big, and in public: call it the “Michelangelo mindset.”

As an insatiably curious person, I need to know what the world around me looks like, and I find this world especially fascinating through my camera. My photographs tend to be made from an internal imperative, a sort of gut compulsion.

In my studio, driven by this curiosity, I attempt to find and create things that are new, special, peculiar, different, exciting. I work to invent imagery that was not there before, a new world I can enter, investigate, search, and re-create.

Whether real or created, my quests are a constant process of discovery.
If I try X, what will it look like? Where will it take me and what will I find?
There is a force pushing me to make art simply to surprise myself, to find and delight in a personal treasure hunt.

Another motive for making art is to learn about oneself. Who am I? What compels me? What inner forces drive me to search, see, and find; what things are there in this world that I yearn to investigate and examine? Sometimes I only answer these questions when I observe myself doing what I do.
Given the possibilities emerging from my own imagination, I’ve created illusions, artistic fictions that display my photos in museums, in corporate lobbies, on buildings and even along The High Line, NYC. This imagined reality gives me the distinct delight of seeing what my photos look like in a kind of dreamscape.

All along, this project has been fascinating, challenging, stimulating, engaging, amusing and deeply revealing. I walk around with my camera asking myself: “Where does my work belong, and which of my photographs would fit best into a given environment?”