MEDICANT

RAW MATERIAL #1

RAW MATERIAL #2

RAW MATERIAL #3

RAW MATERIAL #4

BREACH

ARTIST STATEMENT

I must, to begin, accept that my life will always be haunted by the specters of loss. And so the objects I create begin at sites of memory and of mourning - a cemetery, the home of a loved one, or a historical site to which I can connect emotionally. I collect earth and objects from these spaces, sometimes leaving what I can in their place and sometimes incorporating the sacrifice of irreplaceable objects into my work. These rituals constitute my creative process: they are confrontational and cathartic, they are based firmly in the physical world through a tangible relationship with place but also inhabit my mental world, and the beauty or art that they create are incidental. 

DRINK FROM THE RIVER

ISOLATION

TRIBUTARY

NO OATH

TAKE YOU WITH ME

TO GIVE AND TO TAKE

TO LIVE AND TO FAKE (MEMENTO MORI)

DRIFTER (HOME)

DRIFTER (REST)

FAILURE, SWEET, SWEET, FAILURE

GALLERY VIEW

ARTIST STATEMENT

During more than two years of work at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, I became acquainted with a body of work known as bocio. Bocio, which are primarily figurative, are the signature art form of the Vodun religion that is practiced in Benin. Vodun is the antecedent of the Voodoo religion brought from Africa, via the Caribbean, to New Orleans, where my current body of artwork, heavily influenced by bocio, was made.

As distant relatives, the makers of bocio divined the composition of their assemblages from an inherited, culture- and community-based lexicon, while I divine the composition of my sculptures from a personal narrative and more broadly understood symbols and icons. Where bocio confront chaos and negative external forces with an unnerving aesthetic potency, my visual language is that of a white, Western, academically trained fine artist working in the present day. Moreover, what I confront is my own past, the symptoms of loss, and a chaos that is mostly internal. Yet, in both bodies of work, material is metaphor, objects are personalized, feelings trespass upon the intellect, and visual presence is the arrow tip that drives the pursuit of catharsis - a confrontation, embrace, and ultimate defeat of the negative.

EARTH FROM ART

DOCUMENTARY FILM ABOUT THE ARTIST