WORDS

I moved to New York the fall of 1983 to attend Parsons School of Design. My main artistic output at that time was painting, I considered myself to be a painter. I have always been drawn towards, and motivated by music; starting to see live bands in 1980. Collage and popular culture, in the form of advertisements and reproductions, have always been part of my practice as well. I worked various day jobs to support myself, doing mainly painting and display work. While working at The Fashion Institute of Technology (known as FIT) in the early 1990's I discovered an old box of cardboard letters. The letters were originally used as stencils for creating wall text, window text for exhibitions in the FIT galleries. This was when wall graphics were still painted by hand. 

I took this box of letters home, then took it on a trip to Miami and began spelling out words in the sand, at the shoreline, on a window. Photographing the words with my pocket camera (film of course). I thought of these words as one would think of poetry or of songs, they were open ended stories; suggestions. The "snapshot" aesthetic in art photography was a predominant stylistic trope in the 1990's. I first showed some works with my (late) friend Bill Bartman of A.R.T. Press. Bill was a force of nature, often seeing artists early on and championing them. He brought my photos to a very early iteration of an art fair in Miami at The Raleigh hotel (when art fairs where held in existing hotel rooms, the works often displayed on the bed itself!). There Rhona Hoffman bought my work and gave me first solo show, in 1997 in her Chicago gallery.

I stopped making these works around 2001 and moved into portraiture for the most part. All of the works are shot on film, all are created in camera. My approach to technology has always been from a more "analog" approach.  There is no photoshop participation in any of these works. They were printed from film as type C prints. I have scans the negatives and decided to share with you a new digital output edition of these existing works.

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