The Faculty Exhibition includes the work of Kenyon College faculty members: Read Baldwin, Claudia Esslinger, Barry Gunderson, Marcella Hackbardt, Karen Snouffer and Shari Wasson.

Color-Aid and I go back. I was introduced to it in 1980 as a freshman in Color and Design at Kenyon. Applying Cat-in-the-Hat rubber cement to the backs of these pristine sheets was a labor of love for many in the class. I felt anguish. I found Color-Aid's systematic approach threatening. My stomach clenched as I opened the box and tried to make poetic sense out of its complex array of tints and shades, greys and supplementals.

Apparently the Color-Aid system is a direct descendant of Joseph Albers's color theory of the mid-century. But to my knowledge, Albers never worked in collage, which makes me think now that the whole enterprise was based on a terrible misunderstanding. One day recently I heard a rumor that Color-Aid was going to be discontinued. So of course, I suddenly felt an ironic attachment to my old nemesis.

In a new series of work I decided to have one more shot at the old box with its stylishly streamlined façade. I lay them out, starting from the top sheet down. Left to right, top to bottom, and so on. It was a systematic approach to short-circuit Color-Aid's own. It was both tribute and revenge. I was back in the Color game, twenty years later, on my own terms.

The same day, however, I opened the Times to an article about bird species in Louisiana that was last photographed in the fifties. Sad ornithologists had been traipsing through bayous looking for one remaining specimen. What started as a clean, neat, efficient engagement with the past was now linked in my mind to a certain dread of the future. I began carving lost species out of small blocks of wood.

 

In Duets in Real Time I am investigating relationships, both personal and technical. By using objects and images from my family's past, in combination with each other, I hope to discover something new about our personal interactions.

The Land/Body Series uses images from my parents' collection of snapshots of their land/gardens. These are combined with other images that amplify who they were in relationship to the land and their/our bodies.

The use of combined media-inkjet prints and etchings-complement these inquiries as old and new media and old and new ideas coalesce.

 

What people think about and how they think continues to occupy my attention. In some of this recent work the thoughts are so ponderous they overpower the thinker. In other pieces, I am isolating the head and the thought bubbles to focus more attention on this connection between the mind and the shape of the thought. I continue to revel in the sculptural quest to make both the thought bubble shapes and the figurative forms. Within this body of work you will also notice a return to using more vivid color. For some time, the glimmer and glisten of aluminum has been a focus in my work but I have missed working with the intensity of color. In this work, I have been enjoying working with paint, with the emotion supplied by pigment, and with the brightness this medium can bring to the projects. The other shift of focus in this recent work is my wrestling with and exploring the relationship between beast and person, critter and creature. Who is carrying whom and where are they going? I hope I have inspired you to rethink thinking.

 

This collection of digital images addresses issues of the family. Familial relationships are often described as flesh and blood, referring to a biological bond connecting family members, a bond which is sentimentalized as more intense and more lasting than others. However, within the family unit, interactions of blood and flesh actually both shape and threaten the family's form and content.

The connection of flesh and blood is also often used to set the terms of the biological family's status as the most natural, as a natural entity to which other versions and definitions of the family are compared. My work seeks to undermine this assumed naturalness, to problematize the nature of this union of individuals and to assert the family's complex morphologies.

Because family photos often adhere to predictable conventions, even subtle changes begin to suggest new complexities. These pieces explore the world of psychology and symbol. There are black and white spaces where the color has drained away, flesh without skin, offerings and interventions, and various individuals composing and compromising their dreams, desires and drives. Perhaps what this work has most in common with family snapshots is the struggle for control of memory and meaning.

 

I have investigated themes of memory, object, place and loss for several years. To better understand these themes, I utilize the common object as a metaphor for many aspects of the human condition, while becoming increasingly sensitive to the psychological weight that the ordinary may carry. Since my father's death two years ago, the act of remembering has moved to the forefront of my emotional concerns. I desire remembering more, yet at the same time, the nostalgia, the familial sentimentalities and the all but forgotten distant moments are recollections that I face with anxiety.

Spending time in my studio with a gathering of my father's ordinary possessions-several pairs of eyeglasses, fishing tackle, his favorite pair of Bermuda shorts, a wristband from a hospital stay-has given me the opportunity to discover an internal imagery that addresses memory. The scrutiny of my father's commonplace things, and the spontaneous process of reacting to them visually, have led me to create Drifting. The wall size piece is an outpouring of this process. Other images, from objects and segments of photos, seem to float in my mind as marks continue to build on architectural surfaces. Because I often feel physically surrounded by a concept, I am most comfortable with work that itself is an extension of the space in which I work; it leaks from the walls of my studio. This process of searching out memory continues even as the piece enters a new space such as the gallery setting.

 

Stigmata consists of small spheres of realistically painted skin punctuated by common wounds, scars and bruises. This work posits the sacred in the profane, intimating profound mystery in common substances and occurrences-in flesh, and specifically in the reception of wounds-whether acquired via recklessness, thoughtlessness, sickness, or necessity. This work speaks of disruptions that are as psychic as they are corporeal, presenting pain as a kind of rite and sacrament of life. As exquisitely executed paintings, and as seductively spherical forms, the pain these objects advance is one that is swollen by beauty-it is the ineffable, pleasurable ache of the sublime.

Stigmata seeks to rupture the boundaries of pleasure and pain, beauty and repulsion, the ordinary and the rarefied. Through their illusionistically painted surfaces, diminutive scale and simplicity of form, these concentrated worlds of flesh become emblematic mementos, offering their dermal disruptions as relics of embodied existence.