Statement

My paintings are based on found objects-primarily snapshot photographs discarded by the original owners (in concert with bits of aging wrapping paper, and assorted scraps of ads and construction paper). Each photograph fascinates me, they are full of eye-catching glimmers and cloudy corners, and lively subjects who stare out at me. Handling them is like turning over a fossil. Unspeaking relics whose habitats I can only imagine. Like an archaeologist, I use my brushes to touch the past, caressing the faces, the furniture, the fabric that drapes and stretches. I spend way too many hours exploring the peculiar hues, and building them up until the tiny snapshot faces materialize. I care about these people, the stories that I imagine for them. In Judaism, the highest mitzvah (good act) is to bury the dead because it is a favor they can never repay. My practice feels similar to me, because I devote myself to these strangers, pouring hours of effort into creating likenesses only to eclipse them with thick-painted shapes and patterns. I am fascinated not only by familiarizing myself with the photo-but with the emotions that interrupted compositions cause. Artifacts hide behind damage and dust, we must use our imaginations to make them whole. Snapshots bear little fidelity to the moments preserved within them, and I am enchanted by the simultaneous potential and aggravation of getting up-close-and-personal with mystery.

My practice is all about devoting attention, effort, and focus to remnants left by people who cannot speak for themselves. Growing up Jewish, my family had very few souvenirs of their new American life. Even fewer survive from the "old country". The few photographs we have are precious, but deceptive. They show a lower middle class, white, American family making a home in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch (which was incomplete at the time). Every midwestern home has a shoebox full of pictures just like them. The truth, that the husband and wife were born to newly-arrived refugees, who feared America nearly as much as they feared the goyim that chased them out of Europe. They wore their discount clothing and Missouri accents like armor. Assimilation and anonymity protected them from neighbors not eager to have foreigners next door. They left photos and documents and heirlooms behind. I hope that whoever found them sensed their importance and kept them safe. I wonder what assumptions they made about my family based on their jettisoned valuables. I wonder how much more I might learn if these objects were suddenly returned by some kind stranger from Siberia or Western Poland. Collecting, keeping, and studying the photographs of nameless families allows me to imagine minutiae of an America that terrified and thrilled my grandparents, full of material wealth and suburban serenity. The hours that I spend in the dark corners of snapshot- homes are like a balm for all of the stories, lighthearted or tragic, that I was never told lived by people who I do not know well enough to miss. So I direct my curiosity and energy towards people right in front of me, and dedicate myself to bringing them back into the living world. I am ignorant to their life stories, but I feel strongly that absent people deserve to be missed. By reinventing them as works of art, these nameless people will be seen and wondered-about by visitors. Embedded in countless fabricated tales, they are no longer anonymous.